Today, salespeople have become increasingly detached from the products they sell and the companies they stand for. That is why they change jobs so frequently—an average of once every 2 years.

Go back 50 years, and a salesperson actually identified with and believed in their products and company, along with what the product stood for and the company philosophy. Salespeople remained with companies for long periods—some of them for life.

Why has this radical shift occurred? Because salespeople have ceased to care what they sell. This attitude makes it impossible for them to be evangelists, for an evangelist could never change colors so easily. A salesperson selling subscriptions to Greenpeace couldn’t, 2 years later, go out and sell shares in an oil company. Yet this is the kind of thing that happens today.

How do we turn this around, and simultaneously make it possible for salespeople to be far more successful? The answer is to bring back the sales evangelist—and that’s what this ebook is all about.

Come with me, and let’s see how it can be done.

People are smart to question the future of automation, for it has become part of everything we do. With the quantity of applications and technology around us, we yet still crave more. We become convinced of its power when our package is delivered from Amazon Prime, containing the items we were simply browsing for that morning. That entire process is a product of automation—from the visualization on the screen, to the ordering and then the delivery of a perfect product right before you.

Today’s economy, in which goods and services are rapidly delivered throughout the world, would not be possible without automation. Just getting down to everyday activity, when we run low on milk or other grocery items, we can simply click a few boxes on a supermarket website and have them delivered within a few hours.

Another radical change in our daily lives has come about in driving a car. I remember in the old days when I rented a car in a strange city, and had to open up a big paper map to figure out where I was going, and hope I wouldn’t miss an exit and have to backtrack. Today this is no problem at all—your GPS navigation system will tell you exactly which exit to take and when it’s coming up.

There are, of course, many other examples. Will automation replacing us, people?

No, we do not believe that automation—and further along, artificial intelligence and robotics—will replace people. This is another topic we’ll take up at length as we go, but for now suffice it to say that automation is enabling and creating new jobs. Additionally, I believe that automation will empower the human aspect of life, not lesson or remove it. Come with me on this journey to discover how automation is not replacing life, but enhancing it!

The US Apollo space program was an amazing time in history. It had its real beginnings in President John F. Kennedy’s address to Congress on May 25, 1961, in which he famously said:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
The Apollo program proceeded ahead, and as history tells we landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. Anyone who was around at the time remembers exactly where they were—I was a child in Vienna, Austria, watching every astronaut step on television as was everyone else. Before the Apollo program was completed in 1972, there were 5 more moon landings.

It is time once again to make big visions, Apollo-sized visions, the fashion once more. Let’s bring the world back to doing great things, instead of app-sized flash-in-the-pan here-today-gone-tomorrow accomplishments.

In this ebook we’ll examine what it really takes to accomplish things of that scope, and why it is more important than ever to do so.

Chapter 1: The Real Commitment

What’s the major problem with a project the size of the Apollo program? It doesn’t come ready made out of a box. There’s not even any books on building one. Nobody knows what it’s supposed to look like.

Chapter 2: Automation is My Co-Pilot

Along with other history-making factors, the Apollo program, thanks to a person almost never mentioned in the news and history of the time, set the stage for the symbiosis between human and machine. It also set the stage for the software industry.

Chapter 3: Cybernetics and the Human-Computer Interaction

In parallel with the Apollo program in the 1960s and into the 1970s, research was occurring at MIT and elsewhere into the blooming science of cybernetics. The originator of the science of cybernetics was American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener. In 1948 he defined cybernetics as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Cybernetic pioneer W. Ross Ashby also referred to cybernetics as the “science of simplification.”

Chapter 4: To Pull Off an Extraordinary Project—It Takes Extraordinary Management

Think for a moment what it must have taken to manage a project the size of Apollo, with 400,000 people. Aside from that sheer number, these people weren’t all located in the same room. Or even the same building. Or even the same city. Or even the same state.

Chapter 5: Building By Perfect Components

Building anything well takes time, perseverance, detailed planning and trials. It doesn’t happen overnight. As we saw with the Apollo program, it was built step-by-step, layer by layer.

Chapter 6: What It Takes to Truly Reach a Goal

Only a month after he walked on the moon, Neil Armstrong said, “I felt a successful lunar landing might inspire men around the world to believe that impossible goals really are possible, that there really is hope for solutions to humanity’s problems.” (LIFE magazine interview, August 8th, 1969).

But reaching any goal requires 4 prime factors: time, energy, resources and money. The bigger the goal, the more of each of these things that you need.

You only live once so why not strive to be the best version of yourself not only in your personal life but in your work life as well? After all, a positive work life often gives way to a better personal life and vice versa. I believe there are five things you can easily do to make sure that when you go on an important sales call or meeting of any kind, you are presenting the best version of you.

I’m basing these tips not just on my own opinions and things I’ve discovered personally. Over the last year or so I have interviewed more than 150 people for SalesPOP! who are sales experts and experts from varying fields from across the globe. Each of them brought interesting insights that have been very influential.

This book examines the sales techniques of the greatest salesperson of all time: Jesus of Nazareth.

I’ll begin with the disclaimer that began every post on which this ebook is based: this doesn’t mean I’m taking a jaded view of Jesus and only characterizing him as a salesperson. Nor does it mean I’m stepping all over religious toes and pushing Christianity. I am simply and only focusing on lessons we can learn from someone whose “product” is still selling incredibly well after an unimaginable two thousand years—and this is two thousand years after he himself is no longer walking the Earth. There certainly must be lessons there to learn, and of course, there are. These lessons can be found in the New Testament of the Bible, and I’ve pointed out the exact chapter and verse for each of them. They’re either account of Jesus providing a living example of certain principles, or stories he told to illustrate lessons, called parables. So come back with me over 2,000 years…and you’ll be very surprised at how relevant these lessons are to today’s sales and business.
Nikolaus Kimla

Much has been written about “how to sell”—the rules, the methods, ways to vastly increase your sales. Nikolaus Kimla has written a number of books himself on the successful methods he´d seen and personally used. But little is said about the things you can do wrong, and for that reason he decided to write about the four most basic blunders he witnessed (and made himself) over the years.

In this e-book you will find Nikolaus insights on:

SOCIAL SELLING

Over the last five years or so, there has been an enormous amount of hype about social selling. It was being proclaimed (mostly by social media consultants) that you had no choice but to dive deep into the social media pool. For Nikolaus it makes no sense to embrace something for sales that today has become so tainted by political bias.

HARD SELLING

In this chapter we talk about hard selling—you know, that pushy, insistent,“wear-‘em-down-till-they-buy” approach from years gone by. Or, rather, we’re not going to talk about it. For in today’s sales world, it doesn’t work at all. Today it’s soft skills that are more important than ever, and becoming increasingly so as time goes by.

OVERTALKING

There are several aspects to this major error:
1. Talking more than your prospect.
2. Asking non-intelligent questions, and not listening.
3. Talking only about the superior features of your product or service.

“SELLING ME, SELLING YOU”

Taking off from the magnificent song by Abba (Knowing Me, Knowing You), our final chapter takes up the most crucial error a salesperson can commit— and also the biggest trap they can fall into. Learning not to commit these blunders will take you a long way into become the sales professional you really want to be.

You may not realize it—or the fact may have snuck up on you while you weren’t looking—but today there are far more smartphones out there than computers. There are currently an estimated 3 billion smartphones in use globally. Just to show the comparison, in 2017, the percentage of smartphone users accessing the internet was 63%, versus 37% by computer. There are parts of the world that don’t even have computers, but yet have mobile. There are endless applications available for smartphones today. It’s not just a phone directory—that functionality is so common that you don’t even hear about it anymore. We’ve long gone beyond personal photos and music, and booking of trips. We have complex apps such as mobile banking, credit card scanning, project collaboration, and many more.

The first generation of smartphones only allowed you to call and to text. Each successive generation has brought increased functionality, such as higher bandwidth and the ability to send more complex data such as sound and video files. We’ve now reached the point of live streaming. You might remember the first smartphones—the “flip phone.” Smartphone screens have gotten bigger and bigger, and today are almost 6.5 inches. The screen is now almost as large as that of the very first Macintosh computer. Of course, that screen was monochrome, and today screens are sharp rich color, and are touchscreens. Smartphone 3D screens have now even become available. We’re currently moving into the 5th generation of smartphones—5G—which incorporates the Internet of Things. We’re not simply communicating anymore with smartphones, but including control of any smart-enabled devices such as home security, automobiles and even appliances. Verizon already has a 5G network up and running in parts of the US, and it’s being tested in Europe. Changes are coming down the line with unbelievable speed.

In this ebook Nikolaus Kimla predicts that 5G is the next major fundamental move, and either you’re in or you’re out. A mobile strategy is crucial for every company, because expectations for the future are what is currently on everyone’s phone. Pipeliner its mobile strategy several years ago and currently has the most advanced mobile CRM in the world today. They are not only dedicated to mobile, but are working hard to remain the forerunners in this technology. It is clear for everyone to see that the future is, indeed, completely mobile. The challenge for businesses and sales is, and will continue to be, for mobile to work seamlessly with the whole system. What further criteria will be needed for a for a business mobile strategy? It is this we will be exploring in this ebook. Let’s get started!