8

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Engaging
Concrete Examples

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Selling with a Servant Heart

Ten Lessons on the Path to Joy and Increased Income
Jim Doyle • Amplify © 2021 • 216 pages

Sales / Soft Selling

Take-Aways
• “Servant-heart” sellers follow 10 sales principles.
• 1. You work for your customers.
• 2. Never worry about short-term sales results.
• 3. Ask a lot of questions.
• 4. “Teach, don’t sell.”
• 5. Never pressure your prospects; pushing to close always fails.
• 6. Fulfill the “responsibility of trust.”
• 7. Sometimes the customer isn’t right.
• 8. Do more than necessary.
• 9. To maintain your pricing, don’t become a commodity.
• 10. Keep learning.

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 Recommendation
Many sales books characterize selling as winning. But respected sales trainer Jim Doyle says selling
should have nothing to do with seeking victories. The I-win-you-lose sales philosophy generates minimum
customer loyalty and maximum customer churn. Instead, Doyle offers a completely different approach than
most short-term oriented sales books that prioritize profit over customer service. His inspiring manual
argues that your customers should always win, because when they win, you do, too. Servant salespeople,
Doyle argues, gain major contracts, big commissions and long-term, repeat customers.

Summary

“Servant-heart” sellers follow 10 sales principles.

All salespeople suffer from customer churn, an occupational hazard. Servant-heart sellers enjoy
a low churn rate because they consistently make efforts to deliver positive results that serve their
clients. Customers know these salespeople have a deeper motivation than earning the most sales or the
highest commissions. Serving their customers motivates these salespeople, first, last and always; they have
“servant hearts.”

Take Dave Wall, a sales representative for Liberty Coach in Stuart, Florida. Liberty Coaches are 45-foot long,
ultra-luxury, extravagant motorhomes that can sell for around $2 million each. Wall, a servant-heart sales
professional, sells multiple Liberty Coaches each year, mostly to wealthy, demanding business owners. Fully
60% of his customers are repeat buyers. Wall has sold as many as nine big coaches to some customers. Past
customers refer another 30% of Wall’s customers to him.

“You’re working for them, but they’re also working for you. They’re telling everybody
about their experiences, why they have what they have and who they purchased it
from.” (Dave Wall)

As Wall’s customers repeatedly demonstrate, they like and trust him, mostly because he takes care of
them. Some former customers have even joined his staff and become productive salespeople.

Other servant-heart salespeople who shared their approach include Pierre Bouvard, former president of
sales and marketing at Arbitron; mortgage broker Jeff Wagner, national VP of OneTrust Home Loans in
Houston;and Bill Gangloff, senior account executive at WYFF-TV, Greenville, SC and a repeat winner of the
Hearst Eagle Award recognizing sales performance.”

Servant-heart sellers don’t focus on winning every sale. They focus on making sure their prospects win every
sale. They adopt a long-term approach and develop profitable, enduring client relationships by prioritizing
customers’ interests ahead of their own. Servant-heart salespeople operate in a wide variety of industries,
but they all rely on 10 proven sales principles that work in every area of commerce:

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 1. You work for your customers.

Servant heart sellers identify so closely with their customers that they think of themselves as their client’s
unpaid employees. They always want to deliver the best results, proving a level of loyalty that pays off for
their customers and themselves.

“Servant-heart sellers love to sell, And they are good at it. But they will tell you that the
real secret to their success is [an]…obsessive focus on customer outcomes. That is what
leads to loyalty.”

When salespeople put customers’ interests first, the customers benefit. Similarly, salespeople benefit when
satisfied, grateful customers recommend them to other potential clients. Unlike shortsighted salespeople
seeking only today’s commission, servant-heart sales professionals elevate the traditional transactional sales
relationship with customers to a mutually beneficial partnership.

2. Never worry about short-term sales results.

While successful salespeople usually win their companies’ sales awards, that’s not their ultimate goal. These
awards represent only the results of their hard work. Servant-heart sellers have a more down-to-earth sales
goal: To improve their customers’ outcomes.

“I’m in this for the long haul. I’ve been here for 25 years, and I always feel like if I do the
right thing by the client, they’re going to be there for a long time.” (Barbara Anderson,
general sales manager, WBAL-TV, Baltimore)

Servant-heart sellers are not transactional; Consider Rhonda Kuhlman, a Hearst senior account executive
who sells advertising in Orlando, Florida.

In April and May 2020, the pandemic forced businesses everywhere to close. Honoring their advertising
sales contracts was not the first thing on the list for big Orlando attractions such as DisneyWorld, Universal
and Sea World. As lockdowns started, many of Kuhlman’s biggest clients called to cancel their contracts.
Her response was to accept all cancellations and campaign pauses with calm encouragement. She told every
client that she would take care of anything they needed.

This was not the typical response most salespeople gave Orlando companies at the time. Some insisted
that, despite COVID-19, advertisers must honor their existing two-week cancellation policies, thereby
undermining good will with their customers and forcing them and to waste money on worthless
promotions.

These salespeople and their companies cared more about their immediate revenue than about their
customers’ cratering sales. Consider which salesperson these big companies turned to when the market
regained some normalcy.

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 3. Ask a lot of questions.

Most salespeople fail to give enough time to the “diagnosis” phase of the sales process. They don’t ask their
prospects sufficient questions about their main concerns, pay adequate attention to their answers or make
the effort to discover the big picture in their clients’ responses.

“Make more sales calls is a common sales-management instruction…But think about this:
If more calls are done badly, all that drives is frustration, burnout and high sales-staff
churn.”

This is the polar opposite of how servant-heart sellers operate. They ask as many insightful questions as
necessary to learn precisely what their prospects want and need. This is how servant-heart sellers gain the
necessary knowledge to serve their prospects well. They position themselves to propose specific, helpful
solutions that match their clients’ product and service requirements.

Building an intelligent, practical, actionable diagnosis of the prospect’s business needs is impossible unless
you ask intelligent, probing questions and analyze the answers carefully.

4. “Teach, don’t sell.”

Conventional salespeople often engage in “why selling,” which emphasizes why prospects should make a
purchase. “How selling,” on the other hand, proves much more effective because it focuses on how your
products or services can help your prospect. “How” presentations separate servant-heart selling from
ordinary approaches because they employ teaching, not selling.

“You can have everything in life you want if you will just help other people get what they
want.” (Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar)

“How selling” works only when salespeople fully understand all their prospects’ issues and concerns.
Salespeople discover this information by asking intelligent questions. Then they devote themselves to
teaching their customers how to use their products or services to their best advantage.

5. Never pressure your prospects; pushing to close always fails.

Everybody hates salespeople who use high-pressure tactics. No one wants to be coerced, pressured or
manipulated into closing.

So, why do so many sales trainers focus on manipulative selling and closing techniques?Most closing
techniques don’t work, anyway. High-pressure tactics can backfire and drive prospects away.

“Servant-heart sellers have a strong belief that if it’s good for the client, it will ultimately
be good for them.”

Salespeople must always ask for the order, but that differs considerably from pressuring prospects to buy
or using manipulative closing techniques. Be aware that “when you close hard, you’ll close less.”

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 Instead of pressuring prospects, servant-heart salespeople try to secure firm commitments by providing
clients with specific solutions. Accept that your offering may not be right for all prospects. For example,
Landmark National Bank’s Dean Thibault believes his company recognizes that not everyone is an ideal
client, but he’s confident that he understands his offerings and can fully serve those they suit.

6. Fulfill the “responsibility of trust.”

All B2B salespeople want their customers to like them. This makes sense. Prospects purchase from
salespeople they like. But getting prospects to like you shouldn’t be your ultimate objective. Instead,
you want your prospects and customers to trust you. Trust is a foundational attribute that’s essential to
establishing every other trait and skill you want to develop as a B2B salesperson.

“The goal is to be trusted, because trust is the first step to becoming a true partner with
your customer.”

Building trust doesn’t necessarily take months or weeks. You can create trusting relationships if you enter
every transaction well-prepared, humble and interested in being of service.

7. Sometimes the customer isn’t right.

Many servant-heart sellers routinely tell customers, “You could do that, but…” Then they follow up by
explaining why the customers’ idea could create problems for them. Traditional salespeople almost never
have this conversation. Their training teaches them to never say no to customers. In their minds, being
negative might kill the deal.

“The most important decision I make every year is what accounts to fire.” (Randy
Watson, retired, WTHR-TV Indianapolis)

These sellers always give in to their customers’ ideas, even when they know these ideas aren’t workable or
will cause trouble for customers over time when they wrongly utilize or apply the products or services they've
bought. These short-term sellers regard their sales cycles as a single sales transaction, closed and out the
door. Servant-heart sellers always think about the long-term benefits to their clients.

8. Do more than necessary.

Servant-heart salesperson Oscar Mejia is a successful Univision sales representative in Dallas who remains
humble despite his success. He wants his clients to think of him working for them, not the other way around.

“A true servant salesperson, to me, is not attached to the outcome of the sale. What
they’re attached to is the best interest of the person they’re talking to.” (Oscar Mejia)

This is why – when one of Mejia’s clients is holding a promotional event – you’ll often find him collecting
garbage in the client’s parking lot or making sure shopping carts get back to the store. Obviously, these
aren’t the usual duties of a B2B salesperson, but Mejia deliberately goes above and beyond for his customers.
That’s why they love him and why he experiences so little customer churn.

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 9. To maintain your pricing, don’t become a commodity.

For many traditional salespeople, price stands alone as their constant, paramount concern. Because they
apply unvarying sales techniques to every customer, their products or services become the only things their
customers care about or receive. This isn’t true with servant-heart sellers, whose customers also receive the
servant-heart sellers’ personal attention and involvement. Thus, servant-heart sellers add value to whatever
they sell.

“You know you’ve done a great job when your customer force becomes your sales force. If
you’re doing this combative ‘demolition man’ selling, that never happens because you’ve
won, and they’ve lost. So even though you’ve won the battle, you’ve lost the war.” (Rory
Vaden, co-founder of Brand Builders)

Customers know servant-heart sellers are committed to ensuring their clients get the best possible results.
They know servant-heart sellers will ask sufficient questions to make sure their solutions are the most
appropriate choice for their customers, and they push back on client ideas that aren’t realistic, sensible or
profitable for the client. You can’t commoditize this enduring, intangible value. As Warren Buffett said,
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

10. Keep learning.

According to Warren Buffett, the knowledge and information you learn compounds in value, like money in
a high-interest savings account. Buffett’s daily goal is to become “a little bit smarter” than he was the day
before.

“It’s what you learn after you know it all that really counts.” (Coach John Wooden)

Increased knowledge increases your capabilities, understanding and expertise, making you increasingly
proficient. When you combine all those gains, increased learning makes you a better, more successful, more
customer-centric, servant-hearted sales professional.

About the Author

Jim Doyle founded Jim Doyle and Associates, a national broadcast and cable-television sales-training and
marketing-consulting firm. He is a board member of Second Heart Home.

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