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The first day of the expo arrived quickly.  I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. the night before preparing.  I realized I had not yet developed a greeting that would help customers to relax and grow their trust.  I spent more than six hours working on just the greeting, how to say hello in a way that would invite customers to open up and immediately begin the sales process.  (More on this in Level Five.)

The expo opened and I got busy fast.  I approached every customer that had any appearance of interest with my greeting.  It paid off.  Within two hours, I helped my first customer, in nearly five years, to become a new owner of our product.  I felt so excited.  But, this national sales professional was closing, too! 

I watched this professional literally armwrestle customers into a closing area, extract a check and close the sale.  What later emerged is that his customers gave him a check but backed out of the sale once they got away from him.   His tactics of coercion and manipulation worked in the short run but proved unsuccessful in the long run.
 
By the end of the show, I had succeeded in becoming the number one salesperson.  A funny thing happened along the way, the sales team could not understand how someone could go from no sales to top sales in less than eight months.    In an environment where one salesperson’s numbers were used against another salesperson to demean salespeople with lower sales numbers team conflict grew and so did their resentment towards me. 
(To be continued . . .)

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