Help me find: advice to "work in sales" & sales tips book, advice please

Dave -

I think the post that was referenced about selling door-to-door is probably your best bet (the link to Gordon's post from a while back I mean) ...but in lieu of that here's another option you may want to try:

Health Club Sales.

This will not give you as well rounded an education as the aforementioned, but it still is a great place to learn some good, face-to-face salemanship skills. (I've been doing it for a short while now and even if you're terrible starting out, you'll become good simply through osmosis)... It would seem most of the health clubs around the U.S. (perhaps the world - not sure) have the same type of system in place: person (lead) comes to the club (via direct mail, yellow pages, fliers etc. - the normal marketing tactics - insert any guerilla stuff you'd like to try here) ... you meet/greet them and give them a tour - you first pre-qualify them via a needs analysis (this will pare down potential objections, and will further allow you to target their specific wants) ... then you tour the club utilizing your gathered information - showing them the benefits of how the club will help them ("the cardio equipment can help you relieve a great deal of the stress you mentioned").

Granted, this is not the ultimate in sales jobs - and really doesn't pay all that much ...but you'll be honing your face-to-face skills and be constantly faced with objections that you'll need to overcome (otherwise your sales manager isn't going to like you very much - nor is your paycheck)...

This isn't for everyone ... general you'll need to figure out what the demographic of a particular club will be and how you'll fit that image. In other words - if the club caters to 20-something "muscle-heads" and you're a 40-something flabenoid ... find a different club that has mostly people in a bit worse shape than you're in... don't worry, you don't need to be in perfect shape to sell this ... just so long as you're just a bit better than the type of clientele that particular gym attracts (and some might argue even that doesn't matter)

Try it - at the very least you'll get a free health club membership outta' the gig.

Anon.