The key ideas

How to Sell When Nobody's Buying

Dave Lakhani, 2009

It feels like buyers vanish in a downturn and there's no one left to sell to. Dave Lakhani argues the opposite: someone is always buying, it's just that the old tricks have stopped working and you have to look for the buyer differently. The book shows how to get noticed, find and wake up a client, cut through the noise and squeeze the most out of every deal, while everyone around you insists the market has frozen.

Who it is for

For salespeople, entrepreneurs and anyone who has to sell in hard times, when clients are cutting budgets and it feels like nobody is buying.

Whatever is happening, there are always people who want to buy. Always.

Nobody's buying?

The phone has been silent for three hours. The news keeps repeating that the market has collapsed, and a salesman you know tossed off this morning: "Nobody's buying right now, sit it out." And it feels like the buyers have all disappeared at once.

Sales coach Dave Lakhani answers this calmly: the buyers haven't gone anywhere. It's just that the people you're used to selling to have gone quiet, while the new ones are hiding where you never thought to look. The old tricks won't reach them: twentieth-century selling is dead, and nobody told the salespeople. So it's not the economy and not the product, it's that it's time to change your skills.

The book was written in 2009, at the peak of the crisis, and rests on one idea: money follows action. While some wait for everything to sort itself out, others find the people ready to buy right now and take the market for themselves.

Next you'll see how to stop blaming the crisis, get noticed, find and wake up a buyer, squeeze the most out of every deal, and why it comes down not to a plan, but to one extra step taken today.

It's not the economy, it's you

Lakhani has taken his trainings all over the world, and everywhere he hears the same question: "What could I sell to the people who still have money?" He calls this the main mistake. You start darting from product to product in search of an easy sale and end up with nothing.

The right question is a different one: who has a need and the means to buy what I already sell, and how do I reach them? You're not looking for something to sell, you're looking for your buyer.

The other half of success is focus. A person feels like he's easily doing ten things at once, but on the switching he loses more than he saves, as if he's listening to two songs at the same time and hearing neither.

Lakhani offers a formula: spend forty-five minutes on one thing only — call clients without being pulled away by an email or someone else's question, and leave everything else for the last fifteen minutes of the hour. Hand the small tasks to an assistant. Every hour you win back is an hour for selling.

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About the author

Dave Lakhani is an American sales and persuasion specialist, founder of the consulting firm Bold Approach. The author of books on influence and negotiation, he has spent years teaching salespeople all over the world.

All books by this author: Dave Lakhani

Terms from the book

  • Damasio
  • LinkedIn
  • Personal brand: What people find and think about the salesperson himself, not his company. Lakhani holds that a client buys the person first and the product only afterward.
  • Google Alerts: A free Google service: it emails you a notification the moment a new mention of a chosen word, name or company shows up online.
  • Carlson: Todd Carlson, a salesperson the book quotes. His story shows the power of knowing how to ask for help.
  • Gatekeeper: The person you have to get past to reach the boss: a secretary, an aide, an assistant. In sales you don't go around them, you win them over.
  • Drip campaign: A Lakhani move: a long chain of letters, packages and calls with which a salesperson reminds an important client of himself drop by drop, until the client comes around.
  • Reciprocity: An observation from psychology: having received something first, a person feels obliged to answer in kind. Small gifts to clients rest on it.
  • Lumpy mail: A mailed package with some object you can feel through the envelope. People almost always open it out of curiosity, so it helps grab attention.
  • Somatic markers: A concept from the physician Antonio Damasio: cues laid down in the brain by past experience that make us choose or avoid quickly, almost without thinking. They shape purchases too.
  • Trance: Here, a state in which a person repeats someone else's thoughts and ready-made beliefs on autopilot, without noticing them. The author advises first bringing the client out of it.
  • Upsell: An offer to a client who has already agreed to buy, to add something more to the purchase for a small extra charge.
  • Cross-sell: Trading warm referrals with someone who sells to the same clients as you but doesn't compete with you: you bring each other buyers.
  • Hoover: Matt Hoover, winner of the American TV show The Biggest Loser and a speaker. The book tells how he tripled his income after losing his job in the crisis.
  • The Biggest Loser: An American TV show whose contestants compete to lose the most weight. Its winner was Matt Hoover, the hero of one of the book's stories.

All terms

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