David Sandler, one of the most innovative sales trainers in America, delivers a message of gut-level selling, reverse psychology and no-nonsense strategies. An avid reader as well as a long-time school of hard knocks student, Sandler has built a national network of 60 sales trainers who serve over 15,000 sales managers and salespeople currently enrolled in The Sandler Sales Institute’s President’s Club headquartered in Stevenson, MD.

PSP: Baltimore Magazine once wrote an article saying that David Sandler is quietly revolutionizing the way salespeople are trained.

Sandler: That article was written after a newspaper reporter attended one of our President’s Club meetings. The reporter worked for a newspaper syndicate and his story was picked up by 87 newspapers across the nation.

PSP: What makes your training so revolutionary?

Sandler: There is nothing wrong with the programs taught by Tom Hopkins, by Zig Ziglar or by Dale Carnegie and other traditional trainers. The problem with those programs is that they’re old.

PSP: Can you explain this?

Sandler: Everybody knows these programs. Everybody knows the kind of questions Tom Hopkins graduates use. Don’t you? Everybody knows how Dale Carnegie trainees repeat your name over and over. Thousands of people have gone through the Xerox selling skills course. Tens of thousands have seen Zig Ziglar on stage, on cable TV and on video. The problem is these training courses have been around for so long that everyone knows your strategy the minute you start talking. So when you tell a customer that the price will go up next week, they’ll tell you, “That’s the `impending event’ close, isn’t it?” How can you win a Super Bowl if the opposing team has a copy of your playbook?

PSP: How did you get into selling?

Sandler: I’m not a sales type. I didn’t get into sales until I was 36 years old. When I started, they told me to be enthusiastic, to jump up and down, to make as many presentations as I could. One night I came home, looked into the mirror, and realized the way they asked me to sell made me feel like a clown. I realized that a sales call wasn’t an adult/adult transaction, but a parent/child transaction where salespeople are expected to be subservient. I also realized that customers didn’t do what they promised. Many of them lied and sometimes didn’t even show up for appointments.

PSP: How did you develop your own selling techniques?

Sandler: There were many experiences that led me to believe that I was doing something wrong. One particular experience was the beginning of the turnaround. I remember making cold calls one Friday afternoon and not succeeding. It was down at the shipyard on Aliceanne Street in Baltimore. As I walked up two flights of stairs I said to myself, “If I don’t make a sale here, I’ll give up.” The guy’s name was Charlie. He was about 32 years old and weighed close to 400 pounds. He was breathing as if he had just run a five mile race. It was painful for me to give the presentation. When I finished, I used the traditional close, “Charlie, this is a red letter day in your life!” He answered, “I’ll take it.” Since I expected him to resist, I was so surprised that I shot back, “Is that the only reason you hesitate?” Charlie laughed and said, “No, no, I want it.” I got so excited that I forgot to ask for the money. I told him I would deliver the product on Monday morning and asked him to prepare a check for $600 which he promised to get ready. He said, “Fine, fine. I’m looking forward to it.” I had a great weekend. I was successful and I was sure I was on my way to greater success. Monday morning I carried the package across the parking lot, walked upstairs and knocked on the glass window. The receptionist was filing her nails. She asked, “Can I help you?” I said, “Of course, I’m here to see Charlie!” She gave me a puzzled look and said, “Haven’t you heard? Charlie died over the weekend!” True story. Now I get back to the car, while I’m saying to myself, “There’s a message in this.” I was disappointed, I was mad and I was ready to leave the profession of selling.

PSP: What changed your mind?

Sandler: I thought that there must be a better way to conduct a sales call. I realized that I had nothing to lose, so I simply starting telling my next prospect, “Look, you don’t have to buy from me. I can’t control your money or what you want. But we do need an understanding between us. The understanding is this: I’m going to give you a brief picture of what I have. If you have a need for it, I’ll tell you how much it costs. You tell me if you have the money to pay for it. Tell me if you are the decision maker and, if so, will you make one?”

PSP: You began to take charge of the sales call.

Sandler: Exactly. Setting up contracts with prospects amounts to closing up front. With the traditional way of doing presentations, the customer tends to think: “I wonder what this is going to cost? I wonder when the close will come.”

PSP:In other words, the customer would not pay attention to your presentation.

Sandler: When I talk to a prospect about his pain, I find out if he has the money to eliminate that pain, then I make sure he is the decision maker. That way I know I have the order before presenting my product and I know the prospect will pay attention to my presentation.

PSP: What is your school background?

Sandler: I dropped out of college after two years, I went through the Korean War, spent 30 months in the service, came back and worked in my father’s pretzel, potato chip and cookie business.

PSP: And you worked there until age 36?

Sandler: Yes, until the stockholders who had controlling interest in the company decided they could do a better job without me and let me go. Since there weren’t too many openings for company presidents in the pretzel and cookie business, I decided to go into sales. I worked as a distributor for a motivation company and became their number one producer for the next three years.

PSP: How did you get into sales training?

Sandler: The idea came to me after I had been in sales for about six months. Someone gave me a record by Earl Nightingale with the title, The Strangest Secret. There was one message on the recording that had a life-changing impact on me. Earl Nightingale said that if you make a commitment to a given field of endeavor, and if you spend the next five years of your life with the magnificent obsession to learn all there is about that field, you can be certain to become a success in that field. When I heard the recording that night, I made a commitment to go into sales training. And I just went out and did it. I wanted to know all there was to know. In addition, I had experienced enough failure with the traditional selling techniques.

PSP: What have you learned from your failures?

Sandler: I think you have to look at failing as a positive experience. When you go on a sales call, expect noes. If you expect to get yeses, you can’t handle the noes. Every disappointment and failure I’ve ever gone through scared me. While you’re going through those moments, you can’t say, “Oh, this is a blessing.” But you don’t give up, you must go through it and make something happen in the process.

PSP: How long did it take you to fine tune your sales training system?

Sandler: About five years. But after a few years of training salespeople I learned that the traditional sales courses didn’t work. You can’t teach a kid to ride a bike at a seminar. It takes months of patience and practice. I can’t teach anybody to master selling skills in a two-day seminar. It’s impossible. Training that works takes a long time. We never know when someone is ready to learn. That’s why our President’s Club is like a lifetime health club, except we call it a sales club.

PSP: You’re saying that conventional two-day seminars can’t do the job.

Sandler: After a seminar, people remember a couple of one-liners and then they go off and do something else. They had a good time, but nothing changed. There is a fundamental difference between knowing and owning.

PSP: Are you saying that most people metabolize the information but it doesn’t transform them?

Sandler: Taking ownership is a long-term process. It takes time, it takes reinforcement, it takes competent help and people can’t do it without ongoing support.

PSP: What prompted you to apply the health club concept to ongoing sales training?

Sandler: I recall many clients asking me to come back three or four times a year to repeat the training for them. I noticed that every time I went back, these salespeople would get better and better. So one day I came up with the idea of The President’s Club in the Baltimore area. We used to meet every other Thursday night. As many as 250 people showed up. We would discuss their problems and talk about how they could do better. Over a period of time we realized that the more often they came, the greater was their rate of success. That’s why we expanded the concept on a nationwide basis. Today we have local trainers in over 60 cities nationwide. These trainers are responsible for delivering a minimum of 20 hours of training each month to members of The President’s Club.

PSP: Is membership limited to the local training center?

Sandler: No, each member can attend any local meeting in any President’s Club in the nation. When President’s Club members travel out of town, they can attend our local sales meetings at no cost. They get reinforcement training wherever and whenever they need it.

PSP: You’ve pioneered many new selling concepts. What kind of approach do you teach your members for opening a sales call?

Sandler: First, you have to establish a bond between you and the prospect.

PSP: How?

Sandler: Don’t carry anything on the first call. Don’t take your briefcase. Dress comfortably. Just look like a professional who is financially independent and doesn’t need the business. Be calm, relaxed and just break the ice a little. Everything you do should be casual, nonthreatening and businesslike.

PSP: So you suggest a low-key approach.

Sandler: Let me give you a one-liner that sums it all up. A sales call is like a Broadway play performed by a psychiatrist. What I mean by that is that you’ve got to be an actor who can slip into many different roles and you’ve got to be a psychiatrist who can see past the intellectual defenses people build around them.

PSP: What role does the psychiatrist play during the opening?

Sandler: He begins with very nurturing questions to establish trust. People feel vulnerable and have learned not to be up front with salespeople. In general, prospects won’t tell you about their real problems. Psychiatrists learn very early in their training that what the patient brings to them is never the real problem. Patients can only describe symptoms, the psychiatrist must find the causes, not just relieve the symptoms.The same is true with a prospect. That’s why it takes three or four questions about a specific subject before you can go past a prospect’s natural defenses. Each answer becomes a little more revealing than the previous one.

PSP: What’s the next step?

Sandler: Don’t be in a hurry to give a presentation. Give the presentation only if the prospect qualifies. Then you need to set up a contract with the prospect like we’ve discussed earlier. You want to develop an understanding between you and the prospect as to what it takes to do business. That’s the difference. If you do that, your prospect will sense that there’s something different about this sales call because you are very up front and straight with him.

PSP: You have pioneered the selling strategy of leading a customer from wellness to sickness and back to wellness. Can you explain the essence of that technique?

Sandler: Certainly. There are five steps to the formula: well, hurt, sick, critical and well. As soon as you talk to a prospect, you begin by finding a hurt through reversing questions. Then you expand your questions to a group of pains until the prospect is sick. If you continue to work on that sickness with more questions, you will have a prospect on the critical list. Then your selling job becomes easy, because all you have to do is make him well again.It’s not easy for people to remember intellectual formulas. To help them remember I tell them a story like this one:Let’s say you go to see your doctor for your annual physical. A complete checkup will probably cost you about $300. Your doctor will ask you to strip down in the examining room. Then he’ll come in and poke at you, hook you up to an EKG, X-ray your chest, then put you on a stress test that can kill you if you’re not a runner. He feeds you chalk, he punches you and pokes you everywhere. And you’re saying to yourself, “This isn’t worth $300. I should be out there making calls. What am I doing here spending an hour and a half with this guy?”Finally he says, “Okay, the examination is over, get dressed and come into my office.” In his office he has a little light box with your X-ray clipped on it. It’s a picture of you. The doctor looks at this picture while you’re wondering how quickly you can get out of there. You think, “Let’s give him the $300 and get going.” Then he looks at this things closer, turns to you and asks, “Has anybody in your family ever had kidney problems?” You say “No.” Then he looks back at that X-ray again. Now, this time he talks to the X-ray saying, “Now, there is nothing real serious here. I don’t think we want to worry too much about this. We can take our time on this. What are you doing tomorrow morning? I want you to go down to the hospital because I want to check this out. I don’t like what I see.”You can picture what is going through your mind at that moment. Your mind went from $300 to a blank check. That’s what a good salesperson does.

Price is never an object when the prospect experiences enough pain. That’s why feature/benefit selling doesn’t work. Prospects will put a price tag on features and benefits, but they don’t put a price tag on wellness when they’re sick. If you get a prospect who is in pain, he’ll pay anything to get out of it.

PSP: In one of your audio cassettes you compared the job of a successful salesperson with the job of a Mafia hit man. You said that hit men concern themselves with the job to be done, not with how they feel about the job. On another cassette you say that salespeople must learn how to act like trained killers. If you can’t kill, you can’t sell. Isn’t this a bit controversial?

Sandler: Both of those are good lines. I don’t understand the controversy.

PSP: A lot of people have…

Sandler: They are tough lines. Selling is a killer sport. It’s tough. Prospects are tough.

PSP: I have never heard of anyone who would consider selling as a killer sport. Can you explain your analogy?

Sandler: Just two days ago I was teaching a seminar. As I go around the room, I find a nice young salesman, about 24 years old. He is fresh out of school. He wants to make a contribution to the community, loves people and wants to be a nice guy. He’s going to get killed because the prospect won’t be a nice guy and doesn’t want to give a contribution. The prospect is going to try to get out of that salesman whatever he can. He’ll take advantage of his inexperience. If that salesman’s need to be liked is bigger than his need for going to the bank, he’s dead because he won’t do whatever he has to do to get the order. He really has a conflict. He doesn’t like to lean on people. He doesn’t like to manipulate people. Doesn’t like to pressure people. I said, “Fine, you don’t have to.” Then I said, “You look like a football player.” And he said he played football. He was a linebacker. I said, “Now, the other team’s got the ball and the guy is coming around the end on your side and there’s no block. You don’t have anybody in front of you and there’s nobody in front of him. What are you going to do, hit him easy? Take your time with him? Are you going to say `Pardon me, sir, I’m going to nail you’? You have to get him on the ground as quickly as you can. It doesn’t mean he is a bad guy. But if it’s you or him it has to be him.”And if I’m a salesman and you’re a prospect, and if it boils down to feeding my family, or not feeding my family, I’m going to feed my family. I need that same intensity on the sales call that young fellows have in football. I need that winning feeling. That’s the attitude. You’ve got to go in there and know you’re going to come out a winner.

PSP: Why use the combative sports analogy at all?

Sandler: Because selling is a sport. It’s a combat sport. It’s confrontation.

PSP: Let me take a different tack. In the history of sales training, people have always used two different languages. The first language is combative, it’s the language of war and aggression. Salespeople talk about bringing in the big guns to kill the competition, they talk about conquering new territory and they think that selling means fighting. The second language is the nurturing language, where people talk about spoon feeding a prospect, babysitting an account, hand holding a customer. This language suggests that selling means bonding, nurturing and creating. Are you saying that the nurturing language is irrelevant?

Sandler: No. What I’m saying is you have all those combative instincts, the desire to win. That doesn’t mean you should go in and push people around. That’s the old school. You can’t lean on people. Common sense tells you that you can’t say to another human being, “If I can show you a way to own this tonight, would you buy it?” These are obvious pressure tactics. What I am talking about is internal combativeness.

PSP: How do you express internal combativeness?

Sandler: It’s not going to show. When you meet me in a selling situation, you’ll think I’m the nicest guy in town. I try to not to look like a salesman. Why would I want to walk into the prospect’s office, holding up a big sign: I am a salesman?

PSP: We’ve got to get back to your one-liner, “If you can’t kill, you can’t sell.” You don’t see that as over-aggressive?

Sandler: The problem you’re having with me is when you say kill, you’re literally thinking cutthroat. I am talking about training an attitude and about developing an instinct. When you are sitting in front of a prospect, at some point in the presentation you will hear a little voice inside that says, “This is a lot of pressure, perhaps it’s easier outside.” Or you’ll hear, “Let’s get out of here, this is too much.” Or, “This guy is not worth the hassle.” At this moment – if you let your killer instincts guide you – you won’t give in, but forge ahead and win. The job needs to be done, that’s why they pay you. Your boss is not buying your need to be liked, your boss is buying your need to go to the bank. At the same time, you need to be honest and ethical. You can’t lie, you can’t mislead a customer and you can’t break the law to get a sale.

PSP: And you have to have a prospect in front of you with a legitimate need.

Sandler: Of course! That’s why I suggest the up-front agreement with the customer long before you begin your presentation.

PSP: So you are really talking about developing an internal attitude where you don’t allow yourself to feel sympathy with your customer’s defenses. If the customer has a legitimate need, you better be persuasive and persistent, otherwise your competition will get the sale.

Sandler: Exactly. Sales success begins with an internal attitude. I want salespeople to generate this attitude in order for them to succeed. It’s a gut building technique that works.