An Introduction to The Five Abilities of Incredibly Successful Salespeople

by Rick Wong

Incredibly successful sales people are naturally drawn to action and results; they thrive on the heat of the sales battle. They would rather be learning from an irate customer than reading a textbook on how to handle an irate customer. If you are drawn to results that come from the best next actions, this book is for you. It addresses the most common execution problems that sales people have to tackle every day.


As an entrepreneur, sales person, sales manager, sales executive, customer, and client, I’ve spent over 35 years working with sales people who have been incredibly successful and some who have been incredibly unsuccessful. Combining my observations and experience, I’ve created a repeatable methodology that represents the ways the best sales people address customer problems and cause decision-makers to choose their offering way more often than that of their competition.


This book doesn’t have to be read cover to cover. It might be most useful to you as a reference tool rather than a traditional book. Think of it as a pre-Internet, pre-GPS, atlas full of maps. We used to keep an atlas in our cars and use them when we needed directions to get somewhere. The Five Abilities of Incredible Successful Sales People is a guide full of common sales problems that you face daily. It will guide you through challenges that even the most experienced sales people occasionally need help with. Things like…


How do you build a successful value proposition?
What does a dream customer look like?
How do you turn objections into the best opportunities you have?


If you’re just starting out in sales, The Five Abilities is a valuable head start on developing repeatable practices that win you more business. If you’re a sales veteran, The Five Abilities will be like having beers with peers, where you remind each other of actions that help you sell more. If you’re an entrepreneur, The Five Abilities will help you tune your value proposition to attract more of the right customers. If you’re a CEO, The Five Abilities will help you see why you are a major sales asset for your people and your company.

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First published September 30, 2014

About the author

Everywhere I worked from big companies like Microsoft and HP, to smaller companies, I saw the same thing - a few salespeople were consistently top performers. The same people succeeded year after year. You’ve seen them. They shine.

A former boss, and ongoing mentor, says to this day, “You can see them coming.” Luckily for me she said she saw me coming and that’s how I got hired at HP. She coached me to just watch the ones who always shine. They’re going faster than everyone else. They’re always on the move. They do all the right things instinctively. They’re always top performers and they do it by habit.

The problem is, it’s usually just a few salespeople and whether you're a CEO or a sales manager, you really need it to be many. If you're a salesperson, you want to be in that club. You want to shine. If you’re a sales manager you want everyone to shine. Every team, every company needs all salespeople to do well all the time.

The Five Abilities solves this problem. It’s a simple yet profound way to remember and repeat the five things that the best salespeople do well, always. The five things that cause people to buy from you. The five things you can do to shine.

At the core is the simple reality that people make business decisions for personal reasons. They buy a red car over a green car because they like red. They buy an iPhone over a Blackberry because Apple is cool. Sure, decision-makers and influencers need the data so they can do their MBA type analyses but at the end of the day, they buy from the people who they want to work with.

Go to The Five Abilities to learn more about the personal reasons that lead people to make business decisions and you’ll shine all the time. You can also buy my book Winning Lifelong Customers with The Five Abilities® wherever you buy books.