Remember my definition of selling in a previous chapter? I define selling as an uphill battle of trying to convince a prospect to buy from you when they may not necessarily need or even want what you have to offer.

That’s why it’s so important not to just qualify prospects, but to disqualify them. Make them earn the right to meet with you; don’t be like those naïve rookies who jump in the car to meet with anyone who is willing to see them.

To fully understand this, if you’re good at sales, there’s a pretty good chance that you may have sold and closed sales with people who may not really have wanted to buy from you.

My friend and fellow author Dave Lakhani, author of Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want (Wiley, 2005), correctly points out that there is persuasion, and then there is manipulation.

Here are the two terms defined and differentiated, so you understand this concept:

• Manipulation: Getting someone to do something specifically for your benefit and not necessarily theirs. For example, using high-pressure sales tactics to get people to buy what they may not really need, just so you can get your commission.
• Persuasion: Getting someone to do something for your mutual benefit. You win by making a sale and getting paid for it, and the prospect gets something that will benefit them.

See the difference? Manipulation is about selfishness. Manipulators will “cold read” people and then introduce them to the closer who is best suited to their personality type. Likewise, I’ve seen a famous author running a seminar, which cost thousands of dollars. His next upsell was an even more expensive seminar, and once some people signed up for it, he had the buyers and nonbuyers go to opposite sides of the room, and had the buyers mock the nonbuyers to humiliate them into buying.

That is one of the most insidious forms of manipulation I’ve ever witnessed, and I personally do not believe that people who operate like that will last for the long term. Instead, people will see them for what they are, and abandon them.

Don’t fall into that trap. If you attempt to manipulate prospects into buying, word will get out that you’re dishonest, pushy, obnoxious, greedy, and whatever else they throw at you. And while you may not realize it, the business community in most cities is very well connected, so believe me when I say that word will get out if you become a manipulator.

Another example of manipulation I’ve seen is in the car business. Some automobile dealers have a sales process where they sell based only on the monthly payment. They don’t discuss the actual price of the car, and will get someone to agree to a monthly payment they’re comfortable with, when in reality the customer may very well be paying over sticker price and not realize it until it’s too late. Indeed, when I sold cars, we routinely sold pickup trucks to contractors for as much as $5,000 over the factory sticker price, because as businessmen, they look at cash flow without paying enough attention to whether they’re getting a fair deal.

Customers Always Come First

If you’re not serving your customers above and beyond their expectations, you won’t keep those customers. Someone will come along with lofty promises and a better price and steal them out from under you. That’s why customer satisfaction isn’t enough. You need raving fans who will sing your praises. (And by singing your praises, I mean sending you tons of referrals and introductions.)

As I was in an email exchange with a colleague today I remembered a prime example of someone who has succeeded greatly by practicing the idea of customers first and that sales prospects take second place in line.

I tell you this story because I read tons of books, and continue to educate myself on sales. Sadly, there are self-proclaimed sales experts who will tell you to answer the phone and reply to emails, first and foremost, to people who haven’t yet given you money, and if it’s a customer and you already have their money, let them wait.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to see why this strategy is business suicide. And it obviously comes from those who are obsessed with gaining new customers, without knowing (probably from lack of real-life experience) that it’s not only much easier to sell an existing customer than to gain a new one, but also that gaining a new customers has zero value if you also lost an existing one in the process!

And guess what? Blowing off your paying customers so you can spend all your time going after new ones is either going to leave you unemployed or put you out of business, depending on what position you’re in.

In any case, I had purchased a website—a potential business—from a prominent person you’ve most likely heard of. Despite his marketing genius, he hadn’t been able to make it work, so we made a deal in which I’d take ownership and give it a shot while giving him limited marketing access to the site’s email list.

The site took a back seat to everything else I’ve got on my plate; it remained on my web server for a long time just sitting there.

Before I did anything with it, it got down to only three customers. Three. And I was one of them!

Despite that, this person, who sold one business for over $10 million and makes additional millions each year in his other businesses, freaked out during the website move when I changed hosting companies. Inevitably, those sorts of things never go well no matter how much the transition people promise it will, and the site went down.

Correction: One single solitary feature went down.

My colleague dropped everything he was doing and got on me to fix this. I said, “But there are only three customers, and I’m one of them, so that’s two – surely they can wait?”

Nope.

It didn’t matter that this very successful multimillionaire entrepreneur was rolling in cash and could afford to lose two customers. He still refused to lose two customers.

Wait! Another correction: They were now my customers. But since he originally marketed the service to them under his name, he wasn’t about to have it dragged through the mud.

If a successful multimillionaire will drop everything he’s doing, meaning marketing and product development activities that bring in new cash—and this guy goes nonstop—over two customers who aren’t even paying him, then I’d accept that as a very good explanation about why he’s so highly respected. He gets new book deals for the asking, has an email subscriber list of millions of people who are loyal and keep buying from him, can get on media anytime he wants, and more. All because people who are vying to give him new money get put on hold so that existing customers can be taken care of first!

What Motivates You to Sell?

Now it’s time for the hard part: To take a good look at yourself and your past sales and determine whether you’ve used manipulation tactics, either intentionally or unknowingly.

Did you make a lot of sales because you knew your solution would help and benefit those customers? Or did you make a lot of sales solely to earn money and get big fat commission checks?

In my experience, most sales professionals fall into the latter category. They’re concerned with their income first and foremost. Okay, so they’ve helped some customers along the line. However, there are just as many who were high-pressured into buying something they really didn’t need.

The best sales professionals—and the most successful—do not fall into that category. The top performers are people who make it a priority to actually fulfill a need or solve a problem for the customer, rather than try to force everyone they meet with to buy.

It may sound paradoxical that the people who are more concerned with helping customers than with their own bank account end up being the most successful and the highest earners overall.

It’s all about reputation.

As I said, most cities have a close-knit business community. Business owners and leaders all know each other through things like Rotary Clubs, business roundtable groups, chambers of commerce, philanthropic work, church, their kids school, and many other places.

(Sales Badassery Tip: If you can afford it, send your kids to private school. Many states offer vouchers for this purpose. My kids go to private school, and the parents there are hands-down the most powerful networking group I’ve ever encountered. I’m talking CEOs, VPs, high-power lawyers, doctors, and the like. If you can swing it, do it, and get to every parent event they offer.)

I live in Dallas, and the metro area is the fourth largest in the United States with a population over eight million. And yet, in Dallas, it seems like every decision-maker knows all the others as well! In fact, I can’t get through a day without running into another business owner I know, unless it’s one of those days when I go direct from home to office and back home again, though having said that, I still run into everyone I know in the building.

What this all means is that if you manipulate people into buying—if you’re screwing people by making your income a priority over their best interests—word will spread very quickly and you’re going to be looking for a new career other than sales or moving to a new city where you can start fresh with a clean slate.

So just don’t manipulate people. Don’t do it. Like that crooked seminar speaker, you’ll make more money in the short term, but in the long term, you’ll be finished sooner than you realize.

How Misguided Persuasion Hurt Me

It’s time for another story of one of the many times I screwed up. And by the way, if you get through a sales or business book and the author hasn’t told you all of his or her mistakes so you can learn to avoid them, you’re not getting the value you expected when you bought that book. Throw it away. Better yet, burn it. Making no mistakes means you’ve made no success.

A long, long time ago, in a place far, far away (seriously), I was running with my dog and experienced a severe ankle sprain. My foot didn’t fully clear a curb and the impact was so severe that the cartilage on the two affected bones banged into each other hard, damaging the cartilage. There was no way for doctors to fix it. To this day there still isn’t one. I went to an urgent care, they told me to use the RICE formula (rest, ice, compression, and elevation) and gave me a prescription for Motrin 800s.

Fast-forward about ten years and it had degenerated into severe end-stage arthritis. I had a minor surgery to buy time, and it bought over eight years. Or I should say, eight painful years. Then I had major surgery—a total ankle replacement. Keep in mind that although the hip is a simple ball-and-socket joint, and the knee is a simple hinge joint, the ankle is a universal joint that must move in all directions. The result is that an ankle replacement has the longest and most complicated surgery out of any of those joint replacements, along with the longest recovery time.

The total cost of the ankle replacement including post-op doctor appointments and medication was well north of $300,000, and I had to pay a good chunk myself thanks to post-Obamacare garbage health insurance.

Thinking I was “fat and happy,” I didn’t do much. I spent days in bed for two weeks with the foot elevated per doctor’s orders, and I’m glad I did because it really worked. I was the only case he’d ever seen with no swelling when the cast came off after more than a month. Then it took a total of about four months to get back to walking seminormally with no boot or brace. Going back to my office felt strange, I’d been laid up at home for so long.

Meanwhile, I’d let my businesses stagnate. I let it stagnate so far that things started to become financially uncomfortable. And that’s when I got nervous and broke Gordon Gekko’s rule from the movie Wall Street: Never make a decision based on emotion.

I started to email offers to my subscriber list a dozen times a day. Literally, I had email queued up every two hours, nonstop, six days a week. (I would always give them a break on Saturday or Sunday.) And it brought in massive amounts of cash! I mean huge! I thought I’d adapted to new times and this was the new plan. I was back at my prior income and loving it.

Wrong.

After several months of this, my subscriber list was burned out. I’d stopped sending content—content that brought endless compliments for my storytelling abilities—persuaded influential people to contact me, and kept my fans captivated and always eager to get the next email. I just hammered them with promotional offers instead. Then after the last person bought, that was it.

Worse yet, sending a dozen emails a day that actually work takes time. I got into the bad habit of working from home instead of from my office because I’d get up and grab my laptop and just start writing email copy. Then before I knew it, it was noon, so I would stay home for the day and keep writing into the evening.

The problem was that although I was burning up my email list, I wasn’t planning ahead for when the list would burn out. I knew it would, but I chose to bury my head in the sand and bask in my success at the moment rather than think six months ahead. Think of how many books or how many new courses I could have written in that time, instead of endlessly writing promotional emails that stopped working one day?

So when one of the so-called experts tells you to prioritize your time on getting new business over taking care of existing customers—or in my case, maintain the proper communication to keep them interested in buying again—think about what that advice did to me and the emotional turmoil I went through wondering if I’d be able to keep my kids in private school, if we’d have to move to the suburbs, and so on.

Don’t do it. Never make your paid customers second-class citizens. Always prioritize them above and beyond prospective customers. If they gave you their money, you owe them your time and attention.

Now comes the happy-ending version of this story. Being in chronic pain made me a miserable person. I was angry all the time and didn’t even realize it. House, M.D. is my all-time favorite television show, and now I can understand why. My wife tells me I was literally like House when I was in pain. Indeed, she had to explain the same thing when a good friend’s significant other was in chronic pain for some time prior to his own joint replacement; it’s just the pain talking and it will pass.

So in the end, although the ordeal—or rather, my own misjudgment —harmed my business for some time, getting out of pain has changed me back into my old self. In fact I’ve become a lot more empathetic to other people and their own problems and challenges, so, for example, when someone cuts me off in traffic, instead of flipping the bird and thinking that driver is a jerk, I just assume maybe he or she is late for work or is on the way to the emergency room or something similar. In the end I became a better person. I also worry less, having been in the pit already. I value family and people more, and know I can live without money and be happy if I ever had to, not that I plan to. Many people literally cannot be happy without loads of money, and that’s sad. Chances are they’ll never be happy even with it, because they’ll never have enough. Someday they’ll be in old age, near death, and wondering why they spent 100% of their lives chasing money instead of actually living life. (But don’t get me wrong, I still want piles and piles of money, but I’m simply never going to have any policy other than “family first” and making sure my kids get as much time as possible with me. Most kids don’t see their parents enough. Implement and execute what you learn in this book and you’ll have a lot more family time too.)

The Law of Compensation

If you have not read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on compensation, do it now. You can find it free on the Internet with a quick Google search. Or just buy the book if you prefer, since all of his essays are outstanding.

The Law of Compensation is simple: It states that there are checks and balances all around us, and the most efficient way to achieve success and rise to great heights of achievement is to give first without expectation of anything in return, though in reality, that alone is an effective sales tactic. It makes people feel obligated to reciprocate (by buying from you). It’s like when charities mail you a letter with a lifetime supply of return address labels or something else in there that makes you feel obligated to drop a check for some small amount to them in the mail.

Perhaps the best way to explain the Law of Compensation is to give you a real-life example of someone who practiced the opposite in his career, and is now broke and destitute in old age.

We worked together about twenty-two years ago. Everything with him was, “Sure, I’ll do it, but I’d better damn well get paid first.” And stupid me believed that was the way to go because he was bringing home a nice five-figure commission check each and every month.

Think about this in a job interview: One of the biggest job interview killers is to start asking about salary and benefits and time off during your first interview. All that does is raise a huge red flag to the employer that you’re only out for yourself and won’t put enough effort into addressing the best interests of the company.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I’m not doing that unless I get paid first!” I see it all the time when I look for good people to whom I can outsource work. If they demand payment in full up front, I move on to the next person. Most will ask for half up front and half upon completion, which to me is fair.

The most successful ones, however, are those who go the extra mile and do the job without demanding payment up front. The best example of that was when I put a website development project out to bid, and while everyone else was sending me price quotes, one developer just did the job without even quoting me first, showed it to me, then told me the cost. Oh, she could have it up and live online on my server in under an hour.

I don’t have to tell you who I bought from. That’s self-explanatory.

And that’s the Law of Compensation at work.

One common complaint I hear, particularly in Amazon reviews, is something to the effect of, “All this information is on the author’s YouTube channel so this is a complete rip-off when I can get the knowledge free.”

What these crybaby losers don’t understand is that you rise to prominence by giving away your best stuff for free!

The reason this works so effectively is because it accomplishes two important functions. First, it’s like a “test drive” for the prospect. They get a nice broad preview of what you have to offer, and that convinces and comforts them about making a decision to buy from you. Second, and more important, it showcases how good you and your offers are!

A great example of this is in the so-called information-marketing business. (I find that a silly name since books represent information for sale, yet no one calls the book business that.)

In that business, which I’m in, authors, experts, and other content providers will flood the Internet with free content to draw people in and get them to the checkout page on their website.

I use an online tool (MeetEdgar) to automate my social media postings. It feeds content to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a few others. The last time I looked, I had about 1,200 articles in there that randomly post to social media on a frequent and consistent basis.

Likewise, I know a couple of authors who say they made all their money on YouTube. By shooting a couple of videos a week, or even daily, and continually uploading them to YouTube, they build an audience and gain prominence above and beyond their competitors. One multimillionaire author said that YouTube is the only reason he’s now wealthy. Think about that.

Here’s someone who makes millions a year in the speaking and seminar business, and his entire audience was built by flooding YouTube with so much content that people came flooding in to his sales funnel.

Sales Badassery Persuasion

Let’s make one thing clear: We’re all in business to make money. That’s why I have businesses. That’s why you have a business or a job. To make money. And I’m all for it! However, money is only a good thing when it was earned by selling a product or service that truly benefits the customer. Persuasion is built on a strong foundation of trust, honestly, and integrity.

Speaking of which, honesty and integrity are two of the hallmarks of a Sales Badass. I know what you’re thinking: The term Sales Badass conjures up images of a slick looking, hard-selling rep. In reality, that’s how losers operate. Winners are polished and know their stuff, and are also 100% honest and make sure they’re helping people and companies and not just pocketing commission checks from sales that were totally unnecessary to the customer.

Here are the keys to effective persuasion that avoids manipulation:

Making Honest Persuasion Your Foundation

Now that you’ve seen some specific examples of persuasion over manipulation, you can see there’s a common pattern of honesty and integrity in everything the Sales Badass does. And that’s what makes someone a Sales Badass. They don’t take any crap or disrespect from people, they never waste time on prospects that haven’t passed the qualifying-out test, and they make sure their customers get taken care of.

Intent is what separates persuasion from manipulation. Manipulators intend to enrich themselves regardless of the customer’s needs, whereas the persuaders are intent on creating win-win situations that benefit all parties involved.

Remember all that information about subcommunication, the nonverbal cues we send out? Human beings have an innate lie detector. It’s nowhere near as reliable as watching for the red flags I explained in the chapter on lies, but everyone’s subconscious mind watches for cues and creates that “gut instinct” in people about whether they like you.

Regardless of whether our subcommunication is somewhere around 60%, or as high as 93% according to a UCLA study, the fact remains that our body language and how we say things is far more important than what we say.

When you attempt to manipulate someone, red flags go off in their mind and they have a gut instinct not to do business with you. That’s because your subcommunication is very much dependent on your intent and your mindset. If you’re there to manipulate your way into a sale, it’s going to come across. Likewise, if you’re there to truly help and benefit the prospect, their gut instinct is going to be positive and they’ll be open to you.

When you come from a foundation of honesty and integrity, your subcommunication will show confidence, respect, trust, and many more positive attributes. The longer you practice this, the more ingrained in you it becomes, and the faster and more abundantly your prosperity will come.