Chris Lytle

“Quit making calls.” Not the sort of sales advice you expect from a book that purports to tell you how to sell more. But it’s sound advice. I vividly recall the day I came to that conclusion. I had been retained as a sales consultant for a firm that needed one. I asked to see the systems and tools already in place so I could understand the process already in place. “Here are the call (that word again) reports for last week. My salespeople are making a lot of calls but they’re not closing anything,” the sales manager said with concern. “Maybe I should make them make more calls.” Although making more calls seems to be a reasonable solution to any sales problem, many misguided sales managers mistake a flurry of activity for real productivity. After reading several of the reports the sales manager had received, I came to this entry: The sales rep had entered this description of his latest meeting with a prospect. It read, “Stopped by XYZ Company. Ed (the contact) was out. He was having lunch with a vendor at Happy Joe’s Pizza. Will call again tomorrow.” I read it again in disbelief. I wondered, why document something that did nothing to advance the sales process? When I asked the salesperson why he had taken the time to document what clearly was a wasted effort, he said, “We are required to make a minimum of five calls a day and that was one of them.” By calling everything he did a call, he was fooling himself and his manager into thinking he was doing his job. Another salesperson in this same company had entered into her call report, “Dropped off coffee mug as a gift.” Chalk up another “call.” Only four more to go and she could go home feeling good about how hard she ... Read More

When I was I boy, I listened to “Our Changing World” most every morning on WCLT-AM in Newark, Ohio. Earl Nightingale’s 5-minute program ran every weekday morning at 7:25 AM. It was sponsored by the Park National Bank forever. When I went to work at WCLT in 1972, I found out that the show was delivered on a 33-1/3 RPM record. When I went to Wikipedia this morning, I discovered that “Our Changing World” was the world’s most syndicated Radio program of its era. More than 7,000 radio stations worldwide carried it. It was 1973, when I moved to Madison, WI to work for WISM. Soon after I arrived, our sales manager called a meeting and played Earl Nightingale’s gold record The Strangest Secret to the eight salespeople on the team. “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal,” he said. “You become what you think about,” is another gem. Over the years, I bought many Earl Nightingale cassette albums. In one of them, he said: “One hour per day of study in your chosen field is all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.” I used to study a lot longer than that in college so I figured I could manage an hour a day. I read. I attended seminars. I bought more and more cassette tapes from Nightingale-Conant. I was always learning something new. Since I was selling advertising, I read a lot about advertising theory. In fact, I read two or three advertising books for every book I read on selling. I figured, if I could get results for my advertisers, they would renew. If the ads didn’t work, it would be a hard sell ... Read More