Who are the the Sales Swamis?

We’re a hand­ful of sales professionals.

We believe that sell­ing is pro­fes­sion, a trade and an art form. Great sales peo­ple aren’t born, they’re made. Con­trary to the stereo­type, It takes hard work, a ton of dis­ci­pline, a good busi­ness mind and the dili­gence to do what many peo­ple can’t or won’t.

We are sales­peo­ple with many years of sell­ing expe­ri­ence. We get up in the morn­ing pickup the bag and go to work We worry about stuff like quota, get­ting the kids through col­lege, and whether the execs in our com­pa­nies will screw up our gigs. We’ve had a few great years, a cou­ple of down years but most of our years are pretty darn good. On aver­age we make in 80^th per­centile of most the peo­ple on the planet. (Which isn’t near as much as you’d think)

We get abused by screen­ers that we wouldn’t let our ugli­est cousins date and nego­ti­ate with guys who aren’t half the busi­ness peo­ple we are. But nonethe­less we show def­er­ence to these ass­holes because they hold the key to us bang­ing out the rent.

We’ve been to the classes, train­ing and method­olo­gies. At least half (if not more) of our income is at risk and con­tin­gent on our and our com­pa­nies’ performance.

We do this because we’re too big to be a jockey and too small for the NBA. In short, we’re not qual­i­fied to do any thing else and make this kind of money.

And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

We wel­come your com­ments , thoughts and experiences

if you would like to con­tact us directly -  email us — swami@salesswamis.com

Sales Swami
Our Edi­tor and Chief. The Sales Swami is a stu­dent of the sales trade. He has never seen a sales sem­i­nar he didn’t like and for fun col­lects clos­ing tech­niques and word tracks. A 20-year sales geek, he comes from a long line of sales­men. Rumor is his great, great, great, great, great grand­fa­ther sold the beads to the Indi­ans for the island of Man­hat­tan and his daugh­ter is the top cookie seller in her Girl Scout troop. (“It’s all about fea­ture, advan­tage, ben­e­fit, Dad”)

Sales Chick
With no clas­si­cal train­ing and leav­ing a per­fectly good non-selling pro­fes­sion, sales Chick has been the demo dolly, prod­uct spe­cial­ist, car­ried the bag in a ter­ri­tory and trained sales teams. In her first 3 years of sell­ing she lead her com­pany in total new busi­ness all 3 years. “I’m liv­ing in a world where no one in my fam­ily or per­sonal cir­cles knows what the hell I do or why I do it. They can’t even fig­ure out why I can’t meet them for lunch every day since I’m “work­ing from home” so what could I pos­si­bly be doing?? They don’t get why I’m always on the road, what I could pos­si­bly still be doing on my lap­top at 11 pm every night or why the 2–4 deals that close every year after a 12+ month sales cycle are so worth cel­e­brat­ing.” Sales Chick blogs for Sales Swamis to share what she’s learned as well as to keep learn­ing more. And, hope­fully, to pro­vide the “chick” view of things, “I do all this while rais­ing 2 kids (not count­ing my hus­band), man­ag­ing a house­hold, and most weeks, remem­ber­ing to buy milk.”

Res­cue me
19 years of pro­duc­tive sales expe­ri­ence in all mar­kets has given him the priv­i­lege to call on great accounts, reg­u­lar call points, and the true posers in this world. Another solid ben­e­fit is work­ing for bil­lion dol­lar com­pa­nies, going through inter­nal reor­ga­ni­za­tions and the occa­sional cor­po­rate buy out or divi­sion clos­ing because it was no longer con­sid­ered a core prod­uct. “By God’s graces and solid work ethic, I have been able to make every cut.” In that time he’s encoun­tered the fair quota, the holy grail quota, and mid year quota increase while track­ing at well over 100%. “My expe­ri­ences have given me the men­tal cal­luses to over­come the typ­i­cal sales in fight­ing, real­ize when I am buy­ing into the “sky is falling” trap and keep work­ing as if every year is the 400k year, and make a pretty decent liv­ing doing it.”

Hired Gun
In 22 years of sell­ing, The Hired Gun has had all the jobs, VP, Man­ager, Spe­cial­ist, National and Ter­ri­tory rep. He has sold every­thing from shoes — to state of the art tech­nol­ogy — to pot out of the fra­ter­nity house in col­lege. His first sale was get­ting Deb­bie, the cute brunet in home­room, to get in the back­seat of his dad’s Buick.  He is absolutely con­vinced that the world would be a bet­ter place if every­one had a quota and worked for com­mis­sion. His hob­bies are not suf­fer­ing fools and mak­ing fun of prospects who don’t return his phone calls “I’m involved with the Swamis to keep myself sane. I’m head down, run­ning and gun­ning con­stantly. Used to be, sell­ing hours were between 9–4 and you and the rest of the bull pen could hit happy hour on a reg­u­lar basis.  Now, most of my cus­tomers are on email in the evening and later. Many of my pre­sen­ta­tions and meet­ings start before 8 am. It helps if I can take a step back to share my thoughts and experiences.”

Tuna

A reformed sales trainer who thought many of the tra­di­tional sales edu­ca­tion pro­grams offered in Cor­po­rate Amer­ica were fishy. His high pro­tein diet for sales peo­ple include field tested skill sets, best prac­tice ‘habits’ of high per­form­ing sales peo­ple and unique insights. As a sales per­son in the field of tech­nol­ogy, Tuna has sales, sales man­age­ment and sales train­ing expe­ri­ence. An advanced degree in adult edu­ca­tion forced Tuna to cre­ate ‘fast trans­fer’ sell­ing skills that are easy and fun to learn. You will instantly see that Tuna is out there mak­ing quota just like you are. That’s right – this is a trainer who has returned to the field and has re-discovered his passion….Personal Sell­ing! On Sales Swamis you will get secret, con­fi­den­tial insights from a sales trainer who is apply­ing the skills, knowl­edge and abil­i­ties that he once wrote books and con­ducted sem­i­nars about. You will be able to blog, argue, and com­ment on these ideas fur­ther­ing your devel­op­ment to make money and have more fun!

Duke

A  25+ year sales career sell­ing busi­ness to busi­ness prod­ucts and ser­vices to small busi­ness own­ers, For­tune 500’s, pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tions, not-for-profits, and the enter­tain­ment indus­try.   He’s hawked tan­gi­bles, intan­gi­bles, and ser­vices to increase a prospects busi­ness rev­enue, cut costs, or improve the prospects own customer’s expe­ri­ence.    Duke has held every sales title ever to show up on a busi­ness card, and has worked a dozen or so years in lower and mid­dle sales man­age­ment posi­tions for sev­eral sales orga­ni­za­tions.   With his back­ground in sales man­age­ment, Duke believes in a sales process.  “But because we call on human beings”, Duke is con­vinced that,“like many pro­fes­sions, sell­ing is part art and part sci­ence”. Cur­rently, Duke is back in a ter­ri­tory (due to a cor­po­rate reor­ga­ni­za­tion from acqui­si­tions) and is hon­ing his in the trenches sales skills so he can max­i­mize his earnings.