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The sales techniques that work best...have always worked best. An incisive look at four legendary sales pros, and how their strategies still apply today. Sales theories come and sales theories go, but nothing beats learning from the original masters. The Giants of Sales introduces readers to the techniques developed by four legendary sales giants, and offers concrete examples of how they still work in the 21st century.

In his quest to sell a brand new product known as the cash register, John Henry Patterson came up with a repeatable sales process tailor-made for his own sales force . Dale Carnegie taught people how to win friends and influence customers with powerful methods that still work . Joe Girard, listed by Guinness as the world's greatest salesman, didn't just sell cars, he sold relationships...and developed a successful referral business . Elmer Wheeler discovered fundamental truths about persuasion by testing thousands of sales pitches on millions of people, and achieved great success in the middle of the Great Depression

Part history and part how-to, The Giants of Sales gives readers practical, real-world techniques based on the time-tested wisdom of true sales masters.

However, by far the most influential of all of the men who worked for Patterson was his vice president of sales, Thomas Watson. Watson led the National Cash Register sales force for years and not only followed Patterson's methods himself, but inculcated them into hundreds of the company's sales reps. Eventually Watson angered Patterson, as almost all of his senior managers did (Patterson was notoriously cantankerous and difficult to work for.) Patterson fired Watson, apparently because the young man had become too "popular" with the sales force. At that point, Watson cast about for something to do and finally took the helm of a struggling little company in New York called the Computing Tabulating-Recording Company. One of Watson's first moves was to rename the company calling it--drum roll, please -- International Business Machines. That's right: IBM.

Three initials, just like NCR. And a sales method that was an exact copy of what Watson had learned from Patterson. In fact, Watson even stole Patterson's slogan, "Think," and had it posted around the offices and factories of IBM.

By the middle of the twentieth century, IBM had became the world’s most influential technology company, of course, and was the model effective technology sales. Later, when Xerox’s patents ran out and it suddenly had to start selling in a competitive marketplace, it adopted the IBM sales model, which means that it, too, was using Patterson’s approach. And from the Xerox professional sales methods, either directly or by inspiration, have arisen many of the most successful sales approaches used in our own time—Professional Selling Skills, Strategic Selling, Solution Selling, SPIN Selling and many others.

Another major branch from the original NCR trunk was developed at Xerox which created a sales course internally called Professional Selling Skills. Designed to train Xerox sales reps how to sell complex products against tough competition, it proved tremendously successful. It was a bit ironic that Xerox should develop one of the most influential variations on process-oriented sales methods, because for years the company didn’t need to do any selling at all. Its patent on the xerographic procedure gave it exclusivity in a product that had tremendous value to businesses. Only when competitors emerged did Xerox learn that many of its customers thought that the company was high-handed or even arrogant, and were eager for an alternative. As a result, Xerox invested heavily in developing n effective selling process.

As was Xerox’s habit with so many of its successful ideas-such as the mouse, the graphical user interface, distributed computer processing, and quite a few others-it decided to spin the sales program off as a separate company. That led to the creation of Learning International and one of the first consultative selling skills courses known as Professional Selling skills or PSS.

Again, the method emphasized steps, breaking down a sale into component phases and training the salesperson how to execute each step the way a top-performing salesperson does. In fact, the whole method was supposedly based on research into the techniques used by top performers, with the underlying assumption that these techniques are repeatable by anyone who understands and practices them.

The most recent iteration of Professional Selling Skills is now offered through Achieve Global, a training company that acquired the assets of Learning International and two other training companies, Zenger Miller and Kaset International.

The essence of the PSS approach is recognizing that almost nobody wants to be sold anything. However, people do want to make informed decisions. By structuring the sales process as a means of facilitating the decision process, a salesperson overcomes some of the resistance that a prospective customer may have and builds a stronger working relationship. The PSS course tends to focus on the steps of a typical sales cycle, which may occur in a single call or may extend over several months.

The number of steps in the cycle is somewhat arbitrary, but one of the strengths of the PSS approach is that it focuses on discrete tasks with the sales process at a more granular level than Patterson’s four-step method did. The Primer strongly recommended learning as much as possible about a prospect before the first visit, but it didn’t make that an explicit step in the sales cycle. PSS recommends doing the necessary research on the customer, the company, its customers, and its key competitor so that you can speak intelligently about the company's business when you start

Don Hammalian, one of the original coauthors of the PSS sales-training program at Xerox, pointed out to me that PSS was one of the first attempts to use “programmed instruction” for professional training. This put the course at the forefront of innovative teaching methods, particularly in the attempt to train salespeople behaviorally.

The actual course was built on research into “what we now call ‘best practices’ based on field observations,” Hammalian recalls. “We were trying to take a more scientifically valid approach that could be statistically validated in terms of results.”

Because of the course’s design and its use of a process approach to break down the task of selling into incremental steps, PSS proved to be an excellent foundation course for people who were new to sales. Over the years, the course evolved quite a bit, but from the start it had a strong core on which people could build their own style.

Hammalian is rather amused to look back at the original course, compared to what it became and what is taught in other process-oriented courses today. “The first PSS model”, he recalls, “was a highly manipulative, product-focused model that no one would advocate today. But it evolved into a ‘need satisfaction’ model with much more emphasis on understanding the cust9mer and building a strong relationship.”

The roots of the “need satisfaction” model are present in Patterson’s original Primer, although the need tended to be restricted to just one thing-increasing profits. Later, the definition of customer needs became more sophisticated in PSS and in many of the other process-oriented approaches.