Ninja Selling: Subtle Skills. Big Results.
January 10, 2017
Larry Kendall has written a eye-opening, compassionate, and enlightening book that will help you do well for yourself and for your customers.
I have to admit that I thought Ninja Selling was a little gimmicky as a title, until I began reading the book and discovered its authentic origins in Larry Kendall's real estate company, The Group, Inc. It is a more humane way of viewing and engaging in the sales process that he has been teaching others since 1994. But what is it, exactly? According to Kendall:
Ninja Selling a user-friendly selling system where your customers will never feel pressure from you or be put in the awkward position of rejecting you.
As an natural introvert himself, he was appalled by the sales seminars he went to earlier in his career that were "heavily loaded with manipulation, intimidation, and tricks to outwit the customer." He set out to find another way, and found a lot of great teachers who influenced him on his way, including Dr. James Loehr and Tom Peters—both excellent authors in their own right.
I think truly good sales books are pretty hard to come by. And I think Larry Kendall has hit upon why that is:
Many sales books and training programs have been developed by top salespeople who share the techniques that worked for them. Many of these people have what we call big power personalities, and their techniques work because of their power personalities. However, according to the DISC Personality Assessment, less than 20 percent of the US population has this power type of personality. What about a selling system that works for the rest of us? Those of us who are introverts? Or people who may be uncomfortable with combative selling or power tactics?
In Ninja Selling, Kendall teaches us how to sell without selling, to cooperate and connect with people rather than compete. He takes the ego out of it, turning the focus from you to the customer, and how you can be truly creative for them rather than just focusing on what you can get out of them. He teaches us to correct, rather than protect, ourselves, and moves us from a view of the world based on scarcity to one of abundance. And in that sense, this is as much a personal development book as it is a sales book. It all begins with the mindset, even as it helps build a skill set that you can put into action. And it gives us a system to fall back on, so that even when we're not feeling particularly gregarious or filled with gumption, we can still do our best work.
Anything but gimmicky, Ninja Selling is a eye-opening, compassionate, and enlightening book that will help you do well for yourself and for your customers.