Soldlab Sold Magazine

A newly launched free mag for all us busy and pressured salespeople. Excited? Upon discovery, I was. Disappointment though, soon took over.

This enterprise demonstrates an awful lot about what is wrong with sales advice out there.

Whilst any endeavour aiming to improve selling results should be praised, when the output is as misguided as this, you don’t wonder for long why it is that investment in selling skills is considered so spectacularly lower than it should be.

I read their second issue, a 59 page pdf dated April 2011.

The liberal sprinkling of awful freebie stock photos, the useless type of twenty-first century clipart no self-respecting salesperson should ever contemplate, sums up the generally low calibre. Here’s two random examples;

When someone as potentially powerful as the game changing Ari Galper provides merely a banal, regurgitated surface scratching advertorial, you know it’s time to check out.

What our genre needs, and this offering completely fails to give, are real-life worked-through examples. And not the kind of rubbish the article discussing how Google might sell (sorry, as they say, Schmoogle) provides.

Abstract prescriptions based around snappy mnemonics and numbered steps should be ignored. Solid research, detailed accounts of actual selling situations that have led to readily identifiable bettered sales numbers and easy to digest before and after comparisons are all shamefully missing from this attempt to disguise meaningless, context-bereft waffle from extensively self-promoting trainers as cutting-edge sales savvy.

The only reason to one day return on this evidence, is to see if they can up their game from this embarrassment and prove that we, as a discipline, learn from mistakes.