Sales: Building Lifetime Skills for Success

Do you need reliable skills for successful selling? This insightful book takes people who sell beyond gimmicks, inspiration and "secrets" to build genuine professional sales skills. It guides sales people, students, downsizees, entrepreneurs, corporate customer service reps, and sales management toward reliable effective sales performance.

Discover how to sell from your own personal sales strengths, manage your motivations, sense the hunting nature of sales, harness your unique passions for sales, and master performing arts skills that work for you. Sales confronts sales ethics and explores its history to empower people who sell to better anticipate and plan their futures.

Bob Mander started his sales career in 1982 as a representative for Active Graphics, widely regarded as the premier high-quality business-to-business printer in Chicago and the Midwest. He went on to establish his own business in 1988, specializing in publication management from concept through production and distribution. The primary focus of his work remains sales.

Prior to launching his sales careeer, Bob was a writer-reporter at United Press International, an editor and writer for MacLean-Hunter Publishing, a creative writer for Container Corporation of America, a medical and speech writer at the American Medical Association, and Director of Communications for The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

However, he comes to writing about sales as a practicing professional sales person who happens to have writing skills, not as a literary observer of the sales scene.

Bob de-emphasizes conventional fantasies of sales as a get-rich-quick-and-easy scheme. "Real success in sales is measured by my ability to create value for my customers, not for myself," Bob says, "and in the process I am well rewarded. Success in sales enabled me to buy a large, comfortable home in an upscale suburb, college educate my children, provide for my retirement, and in general live more comfortably than I ever expected. Conventional perhaps, but that's my definition of material success. Not bad for a little orphan kid from da Nort' Side o' Chicawgoh. Each sales person needs to define success for himself."