I cut my teeth in the home improvement business many moons ago, selling gutters and gutter protection. Over the course of my career, I’ve also had the privilege of working for and with some of the best sales professionals that you’ll find. As we enter 2019, I want to spend some time sharing the things that I’ve been taught and experienced over the years, as sort of a reminder for what a true home improvement sales professional is and does.

As a former salesperson, sales manager and general manager on the retail side—and someone who made the transition to territory sales management, then marketing on the manufacturing side—I’d like to suggest a return to an emphasis on some of the basic fundamentals that can make us all better salespeople.

Here are some of the areas of focus we’ll do deeper dives into over the course of my next few articles:

• Attitude and the concept of lead quality: Back in the day, when I ran on 95 percent cold call telemarketing leads, lead quality was an issue. We’ll discuss how a true sales professional approaches that today.
• Enthusiasm and passion: (One of my favorite topics.) For a sales professional, passion is less about them and more about the customer.
• Feature/benefit selling: The secret to understanding successful home improvement sales today is to accept that this way of selling is dead.
• Risk aversion: Would you love to be able to charge more for your product than any of your competitors? Stay tuned for the discussion on this topic.
• Product quality doesn’t matter: The master sales professional knows that “this” matters more.
• Urgency: I think we all know that urgency has nothing to do with a same day discount. By the way, it’s also not something you “create.”

Maybe some of you are saying, “Well, Joe, you done gone and poked the bear now, haven’t you?”

I hope so.

Saddle up. Next time, we’ll jump right in.