Motivation, vision, method, time management, asking for referrals are all the essential ingredients of sales success. When you’re not motivated, you’ll struggle to finish even the most basic tasks, like sending out a batch of prospecting emails or prepping for your upcoming calls. Things that require more attention and energy, like presenting or negotiating, probably won’t go very well.

Looking at just four successful people, I have italicised and emboldened the common elements we have taken from a huge range of successful people and from those, you will see many of the elements brought together under the SMS. You will probably have heard of these people, and if not, please do your own research.

David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy dropped out of Oxford in 1931 to become an apprentice chef in Paris. After a year, he went back to his native Scotland and became a door-to-door sales rep for cooking stoves.

He was so good his manager asked him to write a guide to selling the stoves for his co-workers. The manual has since been deemed the best sales instruction manual ever.

Ogilvy’s brother showed the  manual to his boss at the ad agency he was working. The agency offered David a job.

He worked six days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, for seven years – and it paid off. Every account the agency pitched, it won.

Eventually, Ogilvy founded his own ultra-successful agency. He’s now known as the father of advertising.

Joe Girard
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Joe Girard is the world’s greatest salesperson. He was born in 1928. After dropping out of high school, Girard worked a series of odd jobs, including newsboy, dishwasher, and shoeshine boy.

He wanted a real career. At 35, Girard walked into a car dealership and begged for a job. The manager decided to take a chance – and was quickly rewarded when Girard sold a car on his first day.

Between 1963 and 1977, Girard sold more than 13,000 cars (that’s roughly six per day.) He attributes his success to keeping in regular contact with his customers, remembering small personal details about them, and diligently asking for referrals.

Erica Feidner, also known as the Piano Matchmaker™, gained worldwide recognition when she was named Steinway & Sons top global sales representative for eight consecutive years. She sold over $41 million dollar’s worth of pianos (costing from $2,000 to $152,000) by adapting her sales approach to match that of each prospect’s location in the buyer’s journey.

Sounds like a pretty normal approach, right? The complexity of this particular journey is that prospects ranged from novices who would have to devote years of practice to be able to use the piano, and experts for whom the piano was a very personal purchase they’d spend a lifetime enjoying.

To match her prospects with the perfect piano, Feidner had them test out different pianos – sometimes located in different parts of the word – until they found one that felt right. “If you cannot tell the difference and thus know which piano is right for you, I haven’t yet succeeded,” Feidner says.

Oprah Winfrey
Yep, Oprah is one of the most successful salespeople of all time. Winfrey got her start in radio and television broadcasting. Her first television show, “People Are Talking,” became a hit in 1976, opening the doors to her own morning show, “A.M. Chicago.” Her warm style and expert interview skills drew in more than 100,000 viewers and won her a role in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film “The Color Purple.”

“The Oprah Winfrey Show” hit televisions nationally in 1986, grossing $125 million by the end of its first year — of which Winfrey received $30 million. Soon, her production company, Harpo Productions, gained ownership of the program from ABC.

In the decades that followed, Winfrey grew her empire with successful book clubs, a magazine, and a media company. In 2009, she ended “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and launched The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). An explosive interview with former cyclist Lance Armstrong put the network on the map, and in 2017 Discovery purchased 24.5% of the company from Winfrey for a reported $70 million.

By building a personal brand based on respect, openness, and business savvy, Winfrey is not only the richest African American of the 20th century, but one of the most influential women of her generation.

That’s partly what SMS is all about, and there is so much more on several different layers.