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Vidal Sassoon…

…who died today in Los Angeles – once gave this fantastic interview on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. His name is associated with 60s glamour, but he grew up in a two room tenement in the East End of London after his father left his mother. His mother and his aunt lived in one room, five children lived in the other.

Then at the age of 5, he was sent to live in an orphanage, where he lived till he was 11. His mother was allowed to visit just once a month. During the war he was sent to live with a family in the English countryside. Back in London in his mid teens, he brawled in the streets of East London with Oswald Moseley’s fascists. He then spent a year in the Israeli army.

“All the experiences I had gave me strength rather than pulled me down.” 

He was so ambitious, he admits, he let his work ruin his first three marriages. But his fourth marriage, when he was 62, lasted until his death. His daughter Catya, died of a drug overdose at the age of 33 in L.A. “You can’t go through life in a fairytale,” he said. “The downs come and you have to steel yourself.” He’d have made a fine Stoic, tough, willful and resilient – as far from the Warren Beatty/Shampoo vision of the celebrity hairdresser as you could imagine.

Also this interview in the Telegraph with Chrissy Iley.

“Sassoon’s dark brown eyes are on fire when he talks of his war memories. “We took a hill and attacked at four in the morning, took them by surprise. It was a hill overlooking a main road where the Egyptian heads of the army were heading. If they had passed this spot they would have been in Tel Aviv in a few hours but we took them. Many Egyptians died trying to get up that hill. They had terrible casualties. A faceless man sent them out there and they probably wanted to be with their loved ones.”

Was he very sad that he had to be part of that killing? “I wouldn’t have had any self-respect if I didn’t. Somebody had to be one of those somebodies.”

While Sassoon was off becoming a somebody, his brother was at home becoming an accountant. He later died of a heart attack in his forties. “He wasn’t a drunk but somehow he lost his nerve,” he says. “He was always asking: ‘Why was I put in an orphanage?’ I never asked that. I knew she couldn’t help it. I accepted the situation, he did not.”

One of the great forgetters

A piece in today’s NYTimes about Phil Mickelson’s resilience – which helps to explain why he has had a great career and players who seemed as good as him when young never did as well as professionals. He has the traits we see in great salespeople: an ability to forget, a keen feel for the odds of success, an absolute enjoyment of the process, and a desire to be the hero of his own life story.

“The root of his success is his abiding love for the game, a passion so pure it enables Mickelson to shrug off the bad shots, block out the fear of failure and focus on the act and art of playing.

“I call him one of the best forgetters in the game,” says Harry Rudolph, an old friend and rival. “He has an amazing gift for being able to forget the last shot, last round, last tournament, and move forward.”

Mickelson takes joy in the process, so his emotional well-being is not tied to his results. He can play to win because he has nothing to lose. “You’re going to make mistakes,” he said. “It’s going to happen. You have to deal with losing. It’s part of the tour. Out of 156 guys each week, one person is going to win, so 155 lose. But you can’t worry about that…Rather than play tentatively or with concern or fear or let somebody else hand it to you, I’ve always liked to get the tournament in my control where if I execute the shots, I’m able to pull off the victory.”

Another old rival, Manny Zerman says: “Phil always tried to hit shots that most people wouldn’t even think of trying. Phil is exactly what you see, always trying to be heroic.”

The Art of the Sale / Life’s a Pitch in the Financial Times

Tuesday and Today, the Financial Times ran two articles drawn largely from my book on salespeople.

Selling Deserves a Corner Office

Portrait of a Perfect Salesman

On BBC Radio 4′s Today Program – Why Salespeople Drive Economies Forward

Radio 4 Today

Management Today (UK) Review

Great review of Life’s A Pitch in Management Today by Ivor Dickinson managing director of the British estate agents Douglas & Gordon.

“This is a fascinating read, both inspiring and at the same time humbling. As well as some riveting stories, Delves Broughton goes some way to explain how selling is a fundamental part of our life and that we are all engaged in it in some way every day…The easiest way for me to determine whether a sales book has been worth reading or not is to observe the amount of notes and underlinings that I have made. On this score, Life’s a Pitch proved to be a clear winner, every page being littered with notes by the time I had finished reading it.”

NPR Saturday Edition

I shall be on this morning with the excellent Scott Simon talking about The Art of the Sale.

Have We Got a Review for You!!!!

A great and thoughtful review of The Art of the Sale in The Wall Street Journal by L. Gordon Crovitz, the newspaper’s former publisher.

He quotes at length from the book, and also from Dr. Seuss:

Defending sales is, well, a tough sell. Mr. Delves Broughton might have quoted from “Dr.
Seuss’s Sleep Book,” a best seller that since 1962 has indoctrinated children to regard selling with suspicion: “Five foot-weary salesmen have laid down their load. / All day they’ve raced round in the heat, at top speeds, / Unsuccessfully trying to sell Zizzer-Zoof Seeds / Which nobody wants because nobody needs.”

But concludes:

Theodor Geisel (the real name of Dr. Seuss) may have ridiculed salesmen as flogging something that “nobody needs,” but he was a good salesman himself. He crisscrossed the country pushing his product, sometimes arriving for book signings in a helicopter. To date, the Seuss brand has moved about 200 million units. Mr. Delves Broughton, promoting the idea that sales is a virtuous calling, may have a harder time attracting customers, but he makes an appealing, contrarian pitch.

Too much piety about Rupert Murdoch

After watching the Leveson Inquiry unfold in London, I wrote this column for the Financial Times. It seems that the British public – and some sectors of the American press – want to see Rupert Murdoch do more than just apologize for the misdeeds of his British newspapers. They want to see him on his knees. And he’s not giving them what they want. He exercises power the way moguls have done for years, trading favors and using his influence, and being pursued by politicians far more than he pursues them. We seem to obsess about encounters between politicians and businesspeople, immediately assuming the worst, when they are just examples of networks at work, the age old and more often than not legitimate functioning of power.

Minister and Entrepreneurship Student love The Art of the Sale

It’s always great when people enjoy what you write, but even greater when very different seeming people have equally enthusiastic reactions.

Nanxi Liu, an undergraduate and entrepreneur at UC Berkeley, called the book:

“a fantastic, fun, and easy read. For anyone that is involved in sales or interested in selling, this is a great book… The book is motivation even for those not in sales who would like to develop salesmanship and confidence in presentation…Reading The Art of the Sale is like getting a glimpse into the successes and main lessons taught by history’s most famous entrepreneurs and salespeople. It is almost like a collection of short stories that keeps you flipping the pages. It’s a book that is great to pick up whenever you have a free moment or need a distraction because each anecdote is short and easy to read. I actually annotated the book with stickers to remind me of quotes that I liked! I haven’t done that since I was required to do that for my English class in high school. Hope you enjoy the book as much as did!”

Patricia, an ordained minister and lecturer behind patriciaswisdom.com, wrote:

Jack Covert of 800-CEO-READ selects…

I’m deeply grateful to be selected and reviewed by Jack Covert, the founder  and president of 800-CEO-READ, one the greatest booksellers in the business, and America’s leading retailer of business books to corporations and organizations. It’s great to be reviewed favorably, but doubly so by a great salesperson.

“Sales is complicated. No one seems to like it, whether they’re doing the selling or being sold to, yet it is one of the most common positions in the world and many sales gurus preach, “everyone is in sales.” Its ubiquity would seem to make it very clear to people, but it remains a slippery topic to understand.

Philip Delves Broughton’s new book, The Art of the Sale: Learning from the Masters About the Business of Life, examines this enigma in great detail. From high-level insurance sales, customer-focused antiques retail, and intense info-marketing to the nearly religious world of sales consulting, Delves Broughton reveals some of the fundamentals of this tricky business: storytelling, failure, persistence and, in essence, the human experience.

As Mrs. Shibata, one of Delves Broughton’s case studies and the most successful insurance sales person in Japan states:

“Selling is very hard to teach, because it’s about what exists in your head and what goes on in your whole life. If you keep your friends and respect your parents, the benefits of that come back to you in this life. It comes back as income you can see. The objective in sales becomes the same as that in the rest of your life, to respect others and do the best for them. Then you don’t have to be a salesperson about what you do. Selling becomes an activity consistent with who you are.”

Clearly, not only is sales complicated, but salespeople also have to have a complex range of skills and intuition. They must have enough empathy to connect with people, but not so much that they cannot close a sale. Delves Broughton’s analysis of the process smoothly translates into his analysis of the people involved, where the most successful are often the most complex, all while exhibiting a patterned, learned, and simplistic message on the surface.

If sales, and salespeople, are complicated, it’s also all very fascinating, and this book is as entertaining as it is educational. There are incredible stories within it, from PT Barnum, Jeffrey Gitomer, and Donald Trump, to everyday people and products you might have never heard of… yet.”

Thank you Jack.