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The Selling of Selling
| Article
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19634 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
2,969 Words |
| Author
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Steve Salerno
Steve Salerno's book on selling is called The Newest
Profession. He is contributing editor at California Business
magazine and has written for Harper's and the New Republic. A
movie based on his book Deadly Blessing was recently produced
for ABC by Warner Bros. |
Feeling a tad short on charisma lately? Take heart. A California firm, Ventures in Self-Fulfillment, offers "charisma training." The curriculum, which unfolds in six seminars priced at just $495, may be especially helpful, we are told, if you "have trouble defining who you are" or often feel that you "can't get out of your own way."
It may not seem so, but this is serious business--at least from a bottom-line standpoint. With only four offices, a company like Ventures in Self-Fulfillment is a footnote in a motivational blitzkrieg that took in on the order of $10 billion last year. This year, the industry expects to do slightly better.
Consider that just a few years ago, several dozen individuals were all there was to the National Speakers Association, nominally the body to which members of that trade are answerable (though in reality, the speakers trade disdains being answerable to anyone, and is therefore rife with abuses and frauds). Today, NSA's roster has swelled to upwards of four thousand names, with sales trainers (assorted sports figures, charisma therapists, image consultants, negotiation counselors--and even a few people who still call themselves sales trainers) accounting for no small fraction of the increase.
What's more, sales training, in all its multifarious splendor, may be the last great recession-proof industry, for the worse things get--the more competitive the marketplace--the more companies want to ensure that their front line troops are equipped with the state of the art in persuasive weaponry. Hence, if Hewlett Packard sent its senior sales staff off into the woods to commune with an up-and-coming young primal scream specialist, chances are that IBM will do the same at the earliest opportunity.
Tom Hopkins
The father of the present training movement is Tom Hopkins. From inauspicious beginnings as a real estate agent (average earnings for his first six months: $42 per), Hopkins has fashioned a one-man motivational empire encompassing a series of best-selling books, instructional tapes (both audio and video), assorted aids for the professional (his daily planners are moving well), and seminars--as many as two hundred of them annually, every one taught by the hoarse voiced Tom himself.
At the seminars, the premium is on entertainment. Each is an eclectic masterpiece of packing, with the motivational material
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