Scientific Selling: Creating High-Performance Sales Teams Through Applied Psychology and Testing

Preface

I love selling. Everything about it works—it's interesting, captivating, challenging, strategic, and you are measured every day. Today you have to be good to make it in sales.

Along with my interest in selling, I've always been profoundly curious as to why some people succeed in sales and others don't. That's why I'm a convert to the scientific approach to selling. Science provides exciting insight and concrete answers to predictable sales performance.

By “scientific,” I'm not talking about pseudoscience or laying a gloss of scientific-sounding words over the same old folk wisdom that's been pushed in sales training courses for the past century and a half.

I'm talking about hard science—a quantitative, statistically valid measurement of human behavior, making changes in that behavior, and remeasuring the results. I'm talking about actual mathematics, and PhD-level research.

I didn't always feel this way. Time was that I thought selling was pretty much all about the art of making the sale.

This book is a manifesto for the scientific approach to selling. But it's also a story about how I made the transition to a scientific worldview and how that transition has impacted my work life and my ability to sell.

By the time I started college I knew that I wanted to be in sales. I tried to sit still for business classes, but I couldn't help thinking that I ought to be out there selling something. So, like many salespeople before me, I left academia after two years in order to start ...