A Mind for Sales Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Audio available

Brief Summary

Being a good salesperson isn’t just a job - it’s a lifestyle and a mindset. Cultivating a mind for sales means focusing on positivity, and embodying the traits of a successful salesperson. Hunter explains the mindset of a top salesperson, and how to cultivate it in your own life. He encourages salespeople to be customer-centered, grateful, and positive. With the right mindset, success in sales is guaranteed.

About the Author

Mark Hunter founded the sales conference OutBound, and is a well-known author, speaker, and business consultant. He has written two other books: High-Profit Selling and High-Profit Prospecting. He travels the world to speak about business and offers daily tips on his blog.

Topics

Marketing & Sales

A Mind for Sales Book Summary Preview

Key Insights

A Mind for Sales is all about cultivating a mindset that will drive sales and bring success. Rather than focusing on sales tips and tricks, A Mind for Sales examines a salesperson’s habits and attitudes to find the keys to success. Rather than thinking of sales as a job, the best salespeople make sales their lifestyle. Mark Hunter recommends a number of lifestyle and mindset adjustments you can make to improve your sales using the “success wheel”: motivation, momentum, confidence, and success. Other tips include leveraging old clients to make new sales and building knowledge as a way to connect with clients and become an expert in your industry.

The secret to success in sales can be found in the success wheel: move from motivation to momentum to confidence to success.

The idea behind the success wheel is that these four mutually beneficial elements come together and feed off each other. Once you get the wheel rolling, you can guarantee that you’ll find success in sales and in life.

In the success wheel metaphor, begin with motivation to get the wheel rolling. Motivation to work hard leads to momentum - once you’re rolling, it’s easy to keep moving forward. Motivation and momentum breed confidence, and confidence breeds success. This isn’t a strict cycle; instead, each piece helps the others, with success as the ultimate goal.

The wheel metaphor also works on difficult days. Some days, your motivation might be low and your wheel might spin slowly. But once you get the momentum going, you can keep rolling toward success.

Focusing on customer wants and needs is key.

There are no “tricks” to sales - the best salespeople can understand the wants and needs of their customers, and deliver. Selling is all about human interaction. The better you understand your customers, the more you can offer them. That means more sales and a network of lasting relationships.

Sales is a mindset, and cultivating that mindset means proactively making smart choices.

Your customers can tell if you love your job, especially when you’re working in sales. You have to believe in your product, and love your life in order to be a top seller. Having a “mind for sales” means embracing every element of the sales process with joy and love. It also means spreading that joy among your customers and coworkers. Your positivity is key to a successful sale.

Though positivity is key to success in sales, we all know that life will throw obstacles in our path. It can be hard to maintain optimism in the face fo these challenges, but cultivating a “mind for sales” means seeing the positive even in the worst situations. One way you can more easily maintain your positivity is by making proactive, smart choices for yourself, to sidestep challenges as they come. Rather than letting events guide your life and push you in some arbitrary direction, assert your choice for your life and head in that direction. Making these smart decisions proactively, rather than passively waiting for life to guide you, will...