Why are we broken?

It is not your fault.

You were taught all the right things….kinda.

In 1936 Dale Carnegie wrote his best seller How To Win Friends and Influence People. When it became a bestseller, sales and persuasion went main stream. The problem was it wasn’t ready for prime time yet.

You have to understand in 1936 America had been in the midst of the Great Depression for years, and many rural Americans wanted a way out. Crop prices were so depressed than many farmers lost everything. These farmers saw opportunity in the cities.

The great thing about sales has always held true. If you know how to sell, you can make a living anywhere. The problem is that many of these classic sales trainers did not know how to sell. Not really.

Yes, Win Friends still holds up, and a lot of the advice is still decent, but it created an industry of sales trainers who told us what we wanted to hear. People were clamoring for magic phrases that would make people fall in love with us and sign on the dotted line.

If only it was so simple.

It was not until 1982, with Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, that sales and persuasion was looked at as a science. That scientific method was not used to narrow down what a sales process should look like until 1988 with Neil Rackham’s Spin Selling.

So what happened in the roughly 50 years between How to Win Friends and SPIN Selling? Sales trainers simply took their best guesses. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

When you listen to sales training, remember that most of it has not gone through any kind of testing. It is simply that person’s best guess based on his experience. Yes, some of these ideas can work, but many of them still need fine tuning and repair.

Some just need to go to the junk yard.