You spend most of your day smiling and dialing as a telemarketer. Maybe you log major miles as a road warrior. Perhaps you support your field sales force as an inside technical wiz. No matter what type of sales job you have, one thing remains the same: Nnothing happens until somebody sells something to someone very much like the guy pictured here to the right.
"Sales Tips" offers advice for seasoned sales veterans and plenty of good, solid "Sales 101" training for salespeople new to the game. Enjoy!

For over 40 years, John McCarthy's sales articles in Electrical Wholesaling have educated readers on the basics of sales in the electrical wholesaling industry. The dozens of articles he has written for the magazine are amongst the most popular editorial EW has published. To give you a flavor of John McCarthy's work, the editors of Electrical Wholesaling have collected several groups of articles right here. You can find many others by typing "John McCarthy" into "Search EW

Sales Basics
Prospecting is key to your success. Even though much of any company's growth stems from increased sales with established accounts any firm that relies solely on current customers to achieve its growth objectives will eventually fail.

Successful Selling
The first essential is to enter every selling situation in the right frame of mind. Although your long-range objective is to obtain an order, your immediate and continuing goal must be to help your customer solve or avoid a problem, or to awaken the customer to a need of which he or she may be unaware. Our primary function in selling is to serve the customer. If the customer senses this, obtaining orders will be easier.

Sales Tools
What are these necessary elements that define the work of a sales professional? The first is knowledge — of your company, your products and services, your customers, your competition and your profession.

Key Questions
When used intelligently, questions can help a distributor salesperson succeed in any selling situation.