129 Sales Insights From 25 Years of Experience with Harry Maziar

Jun 13

“Good salespeople don’t sell; they help people buy.”

Harry Maziar is the consummate sales professional. He was the CEO of a sales organization with more than 2,000 representatives. He is the first Executive in Residence at Kennesaw State University and was instrumental in developing their Center for Professional Selling.

In this episode, we talk about:

Characteristics of successful and unsuccessful salespeople
Harry’s 25-year career in sales
Whether salespeople are born or made
Making friends and why it’s important in our field
Simplifying sales
Harry’s New Book, Story Selling: Sage Advice and Common Sense About Sales and Success
Embracing new ideas about sales

To learn more, listen to the full episode!

Characteristics of Salespeople Who Failed

Most salespeople fail because of a lack of commitment and enthusiasm – not necessarily talent – and bad work ethics. There’s a quote that goes, “The best rules of success won’t work unless you do.”

It’s not rocket science – a salesperson needs to learn to do what he or she does better than anyone. Secondly, you need to do it to the best of your ability, and three, you have to be passionate.

Do people need to believe in the thing they’re selling?

More and more people today are loyal to purpose-driven brands.

If you’re not comfortable with your company or its philosophy, style, or methods of doing business, get the heck out of there. That’s not where you want to be.

If you don’t have confidence and enthusiasm for what you’re doing, how do you impart that to others? So if the fit’s not right, it’s wrong.

The Most Important Thing About Running a Business

The most important thing to running a successful business is simply to please your customer.

If you please your customer, everything else falls in. You can get a return on investment. You can get all the adequate measurements and points that you want. But it starts with your customer being happy with the product, being happy with you, with the service, with integrity and with the follow up.