Our world of selling is closed off from other areas of business that continue to adopt and embrace new, efficient ideas. I was reminded of this recently while re- reading Seth Godin's "Permission Marketing." Here's a book that was intended for business owners and marketing executives, yet it provides a much-needed dose of common sense that would be of great benefit to sales organizations, especially sales managers, who continue to cling to very old, and, in their minds, very right, ideas. Unfortunately, our brave new world has made these old ideas very wrong.

Seth Godin talks about Interruption Marketing versus Permission Marketing. Interruption Marketing is traditional advertising that interrupts your day in an attempt to get your attention and sell you something. In other words, it is the marketing equivalent of Cold Calling. Permission Marketing is systematically getting prospects to give you permission to present to them. In other words, it is marketing's equivalent of what I teach salespeople to do. In the book, Seth uses the metaphor of someone trying to get married to describe the flaw in Interruption Marketing, or Cold Calling. The bachelor goes into a singles bar and asks every woman in the place to marry him. When they all say no, he blames his clothes, buys a new suit, and tries again at another bar, only to fail again and again, just like a cold caller.

Are you getting the point he tries to make in that story? Think about it. A salesperson spends weeks cold calling with dismal results. The salesperson goes to the sales manager for advice on what to do differently to start getting results. A conversation ensues about what the salesperson is doing. A lot of old ideas begin to surface. Ideas such as "Initial Benefit Statement," "Elevator Speech," and other concepts that once upon a time were the right answers, but have since become very wrong answers. Working on these things is the equivalent of the man in the story blaming his failure on the suit, changing into a new suit, then going to a different singles bar to do it all over again.

With the business world in its present state, I really don't see how salespeople can afford to keep fooling away their time on old ideas that were once right but are now fatally wrong. It is this very feature of capitalism that is causing salespeople, managers and organizations to fail in record numbers. Capitalism is essentially "creative destruction." In other words, capitalism is a perpetual cycle of destroying old, less-efficient businesses and ideas and replacing them with new, more efficient ones. People and companies are clinging to old, obsolete ideas and are being dragged down to failure by them. Yet they still won't let go. I think the reason they can't let go is simply because it wasn't all that long ago that they really did have the right answers. It reminds me of a story I once heard about Albert Einstein when he was a professor. One of his student assistants who was preparing for an incoming class said, "Professor Einstein, what test are we giving them?" To which Einstein replied, "The same test we gave them last week." Bewildered, the student assistant replied, "But Professor Einstein, we already gave that test." Einstein simply said, "Yes, but the answers are different this week."

The bottom line is that the answers are different. The rules have changed. Time is running out for those who do not adapt to the new rules. As Napoleon Hill put it so well, "Whenever a nation, a business institution, or an individual ceases to change and settles into a rut of routine habits, some mysterious power enters and smashes the setup, breaks up the old habits, and lays the foundation for new and better habits."

If you're not achieving the sales success you desire, perhaps it is time for you to lay the foundation for new and better habits.

Frank Rumbauskas

Frank J. Rumbauskas, Jr., author of the New York Times Best-Seller "Never Cold Call Again: Achieve Sales Greatness Without Cold Calling," spent several difficult years in sales, frustrated and convinced that there must be a better way than the familiar chants of "cold call more" and "increase your activity" so frequently heard from well-meaning but otherwise clueless sales managers.

While working as an account executive for a Fortune 100 company in the mid 1990s, Mr. Rumbauskas was mentored by another A.E. who went from entry- level sales to upper management in 3 years, something unheard of in this particular organization. This top producer revealed a very basic principle to Mr. Rumbauskas. He immediately applied it and suddenly began to achieve tremendous results. That simple principle forms the basis of this entire program. Mr. Rumbauskas has taken it, perfected it, designed systems around it, and is now able to apply it to any and all sales jobs. He went on to successfully start and run two sales agencies based on these principles before moving into sales training.

His biggest strength compared to other sales trainers and authors is the fact that he is now a business owner who meets with salespeople on a regular basis. He is careful to observe everything they do right as well as everything they do wrong, and his training materials reflect this firsthand experience.

Originally from Linden, New Jersey, Mr. Rumbauskas now resides in Phoenix, Arizona. He is actively involved with various community and civic organizations in the Phoenix area, and is an active entrepreneur - he owns a mortgage protection life insurance agency which uses the principles he teaches to generate business without cold calling, and is a major holder in an emerging wireless internet company. He enjoys reading the great number of success stories we receive from students of this program. If you have a success story you haven't yet shared with us, please do so!