Jeffery Gitomer

                             Jeffrey Gitomer, President and Founder
                             Buy Gitomer, Inc.
                             310 Arlington Avenue, Loft 329
                             Charlotte, North Carolina 28203
                             Tel.  704 333 1112
                             jeffery@gitomer.com
                             salesman@gitomer.com

Part I

    Jeffery Gitomer is a leading sales trainer, probably the leading sales trainer, in the U.S. (A German equivalent was Michael Birkenbihl, author of Train the Trainer, 1972 and father of the nowadays better known seminar leader Vera Birkenbihl.) In Feb. 2010 Gitomer presented his first webinar. The hour-long talk had a purely domestic U.S. orientation, in contrast to the seminars he holds in London. The webinar can be viewed at www.nsbank.com/gitomer. However far better are his sales books and his interesting The Little Black Book of Connections. This last is reviewed, with excerpts, below.

    His free weekly electronic newsletter Sales Caffeine has a rapidly growing subscription list of 300,000 (as of 2010). It offers excellent information about and suggestions for selling, week in and week out. The best of his series of sales books is the comprehensive: Sales Bible, The Ultimate Sales Resource, Including the 10.5 Commandments of Sales Success, New Edition, Collins, 2008. Also excellent is Little Red Book of Sales Answers, 99.5 Real World Answers that Make Sense, Make Sales and Make Money", Prentice Hall, 2005.

    For those who would never deign to consider themselves mere salesmen, Gitomer´s networking book is recommended, especially for networking newbies, including any professionals such as attorneys, CPAs and MBAs who are slightly introverted. In reviews critics sometimes provide lengthy summaries of a book. These are often written far less well than the original. A better, fairer approach is to let the author speak for himself.  That should not be with a sentence or two lifted out of context, but with excerpts long enough to give the reader a real feel for the writing. This approach is, in fact, followed by Amazon.com in its "Look Inside" sidebars. We continue in that spirit in the following review of this networking book. 

Jeffrey Gitomer´s Little Black Book of Connections
- 6.5 Assets -
for Networking Your Way to
RICH Relationships

    The book (Bard Press, 2006) opens on the inside of the front cover with the first sentence, and the facing page with the next two sentences:

ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL, PEOPLE WANT TO DO BUSINESS WITH THEIR FRIENDS.

ALL THINGS BEING NOT QUITE SO EQUAL, PEOPLE STILL WANT TO DO BUSINESS WITH THEIR FRIENDS. 

HINT: To climb the ladder of success,

you don’t need more techniques and strategies,

you need more friends.

Introduction 

    Granted, the above is common sense, but well stated. The contrary approach – beholden to no one, the solitary trapper, the lone ranger or introverted Rambo making his way through the world on his own – is a very poor life strategy. Granted, being the ultimate lone wolf works for some. (In the author’s case, books always were, and still are, his best friends. However over the decades he has become a little less intense than at the beginning of his career when he was a “take-no-prisoners” line manager.) The solitary lifestyle is certainly not one generally recommended in the business world.

    An interesting side effect is that the lone wolf style is not necessarily a negative for executive coaching. Quite a few CEOs, having climbed the pyramid and arrived at the top, feel alone and, in a certain sense, lonely. They could use a devil´s advocate, a sounding board, not to boast --- or lament -- about their personal situations, but rather to reflect on corporate ones – the issues of strategy, of managing change, of unrealized opportunities and unforeseen threats (competitive, political), of unanticipated leadership challenges.

Two Caveats

The first is to make your connections long, long before you need them. Need help in making a career change? Think you can go to some networking events, make instant friends, bond, and people will help you? Forget it.

    The second is to be clear about the risks of your own style of networking. At one extreme is becoming a victim of people who take advantage of your generousity with your time and knowledge. It doesn´t take many of these to drain you. The other extreme is known as mafia networking: "I don´t do favors. I accumulate debts."

Three Lead Balloons for Networking Pros                                                             To return to Gitomer´s book, it does have a number of lead balloons, but these are "outvalued" by the golden nuggets. The lead balloons include considerable self-aggrandizement and relentless self-promotion. Furthermore recommending to one and all a weekly electronic newsletter is unrealistic.

    Downright fatuous is the suggestion to fax (e-mail) a CEO a solid customer lead for five days in a row. This astonishing performance is to serve as a prelude to delivering a sixth lead personally. CEO´s of larger companies aren´t generally dealing with sales. Or are you going to provide a lead for enterprise sales (infrastructure projects) or joint ventures five days in a row? And at a small company level, you are that expert at selling in its market niche?

Three Golden Nuggets for Networking Newbies: 

    Most people spend all their time thinking of what the higher level, higher status, richer, more powerful connection can do for them. Wrong, big mistake! What you should be doing is thinking of what you can do for them. Gitomer writes: (p.9 f.)

            "Think about your most powerful connections right now. Make a list of four or five of them. (Hopefully, you have that many.) Next to each of their names, write a sentence or two about how they have helped you, and how you would like them to continue to help you. Under that, write a sentence or two about how you have helped them.

            AHA! There’s probably nothing to write about how you helped them. Or at least not enough." 

    Considerably later in the book Gitomer makes clear that one shouldn´t get carried away thinking that a low level connection at Megacorporation is going to be a fast track to its CEO either. His creative admonishment is:

Six Degrees of Separation, op. cit., p. 163:

            “The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy, in a short story called "Chains". The story said you can reach anyone by going through six degrees through six people. . . know someone, who knows someone else . . . (six times), who knows the president of the United States.

             If you have to go through six degrees of who, who, who, who, who, who – the likelihood of getting to that person is zero. . . Look at the most powerful people you know personally . . . and see if you can limit the degrees of connection down to one degree. By doing this, you are more likely to connect, especially if your one degree person is a friend of his or hers, and can personally recommend you."

    Saving the best for last, one of the largest gold nuggets was his adaptation of the elevator speech. We admit that our perception reflects our own bias towards the Socratic method. Asking the right questions is a key to far more than sales success. This key has the power to open all kinds of doors. It is a veritable "open Sesame," worthy of Ali Baba himself.

The Reverse Personal Commercial, op. cit. p. 78 f.:

    This approach is a refinement of what is sometimes known as the elevator or cocktail speech. That is your personal thirty-second statement to get someone interested in you. However Gitomer improves this approach by changing its direction 180 degrees. You do not talk about yourself at all. Rather you ask an on-target question, followed by more questions.

    When Jeffrey Gitomer meets someone in a business setting, and feels that person is a prospect for his sales training, he describes his approach as follows:

            “Hi, my name’s Jeffrey. How many of your salespeople didn’t meet their sales goals last year?” . . . This question immediately makes the prospect think, maybe a bit uncomfortably. . .  Suppose the response is “Seventy percent did not meet their goal.” I would come back with. . .: Geez, that’s horrible! What do think caused that? . . .What kind of plan do you have in place this year to help them exceed their goals?. . . what were the prime reasons they failed? Is it the people, or the market? What will you do next year that is different. . .?

            . . . You see, I have twenty-five questions I’m ready to ask based on the responses. . .

            Now the close, “Sounds like a interesting challenge, Mr. Jones. I don’t know if we’re a perfect fit or not. Let’s have breakfast next week. I’ll let you go into a little more detail and if I think I can help you, I’ll tell you. And if I don’t think I can help you, I’ll tell you that too. I’ll even go so far as to recommend someone I think can help the most. Is that fair enough?”

            That entire engagement took less than two minutes. The other person did eighty percent of the talking, and I walk away with an appointment. Notice I never even said my last name as part of my sales pitch. I never said my company name. I never said how long I’ve been in business, how great I am. . .“

    The book is replete with entertaining reminders of networking common, and sometimes uncommon, sense. Most CEOs should be able to think of a variety of people, and not just young high potentials either, who would profit by being reminded of its suggestions and putting the personally relevant ones into practice.

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