Sound familiar?
I need to think about itand you don't know what to say.
It isn't talent. It's a craft, and it can be trained.
The average salesperson closes 26% of deals. The best close almost 60%.
How I can help
For you
Four evenings in a small group. You learn to sell without discounting and try it on your own customers straight away. Runs in Czech.
Next start dates:
For companies
Built around your market and your customers, in Czech or English. So your team sells more and stops giving margin away.
Talks and workshops for conferences, company events and universities. Write to me
Contact
Pick a date in the calendar, or tell me what you're dealing with. I read it myself and I reply myself.
Point your phone camera at the QR code and the contact saves with one tap.
Booking received
Scan the QR code in your banking app (Czech banks) and everything fills in by itself. Your place is reserved as soon as the payment arrives.
For an international transfer use IBAN CZ98 0600 0000 0002 5710 2571 and put the variable symbol in the payment reference, so I can match it to you. If the group does not open, you get another date or a full refund.
Need an invoice for your company? Don't pay by QR, write to me at info@lukasgerhardt.cz and I'll send you an invoice.
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Want to know more?
No need to read it all. Click what interests you.
Evening by evening
No sitting through slides. Of the three hours each evening, I talk for half an hour at most. The rest of the time you practise, on your own customers and your own deals.
We map your open deals and practise the first minutes of a meeting.
We practise questions that uncover the real problem and translate your product into the customer's money.
We practise objections and price negotiations, tough buyer included. No discounts.
We practise presenting and closing, and put together your plan for the next 90 days.
You get the detailed breakdown in the workbook at the very first session.
The rule for all feedback: one thing that worked, one thing to try differently, and a new version of the line on the spot.
Four times round. After a month they are no longer tips from a course. They are your habits.
The last part of every evening
At the end of every evening I leave room for whatever you want to work on. A meeting on Friday that's keeping you up at night? A proposal that has been sitting there for three weeks? A boss you need to convince? A customer you just can't crack? Bring it and we will work through it together. The group becomes your practice customer before you go in for real.
When it pays for itself
One discount you don't give.Five per cent of a single CZK 300,000 order is CZK 15,000. More than the whole programme costs.
Pick a dateWhy a group
Without repetition, we forget most of what's new within a few days. That's the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. So I don't train in one-off sessions, I train in four steps. In between, you try new things with your real customers.
Same market. Same product. Same price list.
Where do you want to be?
more deals won by teams that train and coach their salespeople continuously, not once a year.
Korn Ferry, Sales Enablement studymore impact from training followed by regular practice than from a one-off course on its own.
Challenger, building on CEB researchis roughly how much more a star sells in complex B2B sales than an average salesperson.
CEB, research behind The Challenger SaleWhat's in it for you
Sales is one of the few jobs where nobody can sweep your results under the carpet. They show down to the last crown, every month. That's why you can grow faster here than anywhere else.
Commission and bonuses grow with performance. What you earn depends more on your work than on a salary scale.
When you hit your numbers, nobody checks where you spend Tuesday morning.
In any company, the person who brings in the money gets heard most. Your word starts to carry weight in meetings too.
Selling an idea to your boss, a plan to your team, a project to an investor. If you can sell, you can lead.
Companies cut all sorts of things. The people who bring in revenue are the last to go.
About me
My name is Lukáš Gerhardt. If you're standing where I stood in 2015, I know exactly how it feels. I didn't start out as a natural. I started as a lad behind a counter who had learnt the specs by heart and couldn't understand why people kept walking away.
An electronics and furniture store. A discount sign above my head, lines about performance and features in my head. Customers nodded, said thank you and left. I took every no home with me.
Then it hit me: they weren't saying no to me. They were saying no to a sales pitch that gave them nothing. I started showing off less and asking more. Rejection stopped hurting the moment I started treating it as information.
From selling over the counter I moved on to fitting out entire offices and working on investor projects. I finished in the TOP 10 of the chain's nationwide sales ranking.
The link between a British importer and the manufacturing plant. This is where I learnt that half of every deal happens inside your own company, with production, logistics and people who will never see the customer.
I deliberately went into the field as a sales rep. In one year I grew the fire protection segment in my region by 400%, won a quarterly sales competition and was rated outstanding. I was one of the first to build myself an AI assistant to process enquiries and visit notes.
I'm responsible for a product portfolio and marketing strategy across a region of eight countries. The programmes and training on this site I run under my own name, in my own time.
No usually doesn't mean no. It means I haven't asked the right question yet.
The most important thing the counter taught me in 2015. Now I'm teaching it to you.I studied international marketing (Ing., a Czech master's degree), management (Ing.) and hold an MBA in executive management and leadership. I have a full-time job during the day. I run programmes and training in my own time, which is why groups meet in the evening, on Tuesday or Thursday from 17:00. And it's why I only take on as many as I can give proper attention to.
Left: the store where I started. Right: where I switch off best, four kilometres above the ground, moments before the parachute opens.
Track record
Numbers I'm proud of.
The Salesperson's Handbook
In 2015 I stood behind the counter of an electronics store and heard one “no” after another. Here is everything I was missing back then: the most valuable things forty years of research have found out about selling, turned into practice I have tested myself in the field. Charts instead of paragraphs. And at the end of every chapter, what you do first thing tomorrow.
Here on the site you get the essence of every chapter. The full handbook as a PDF, with worksheets, conversation scripts and printable tables, is coming soon at an introductory price. I want it among the first
Handbook intro
They aren't better talkers or more likeable people. They do seven things differently, and they do them every time. Measured on millions of real calls. How many of them do you do?
Where more people decide and more money is at stake, a star doesn't sell a little more. They sell almost three times as much. That's why training pays off in B2B more than anywhere else. If you sell to companies, this is where you have the most room to grow.
Companies now do most of their buying without a salesperson. Meetings with all their suppliers put together get only a small slice of their time. And you share that slice with the competition.
The whole buying process as 100%.
When they choose between three suppliers, you get5 to 6% of the timeThat is your whole window to change anything.
The rest goes on research and on getting everyone inside the company to agree. Buying today isn't a straight line. It's a maze.
So your meeting has to bring something the customer can't find online: a view of their own operation, a number they haven't worked out themselves, or material they can use to win over their colleagues. If you only turn up to present the catalogue, you've taken a slot in their diary and brought nothing. I did exactly that for years.
You hear it every week
I still need to run it past my boss.
Then find out who that boss is and what they need to hear from you. Chapter 02
The most common reason a deal dies isn't the competition. It's a person you didn't know about.
Colour shows the role in the purchase, not the position on the org chart.
decide a more complex B2B purchase. Each of them brings four to five pieces of information of their own, which the group has to reconcile.
Tool: how to talk to whom
Pick a role. You'll see what they care about, how to talk to them and what to watch out for.
This took me years to understand: the best salespeople aren't the most eloquent. They are the ones whose customers talk more than they do.
Share of the time the salesperson is talking.
Neil Rackham and the Huthwaite team observed 35,000 sales meetings in 23 countries. In large deals, closing technique wasn't what decided it. Questions were.
You hear it every week
We do it the old way and it works.
Then work out for them what the old way is costing them. Chapter 04
Most salespeople describe what their product can do. The customer cares what it will do for their operation, their money and their peace of mind.
“Our cutting fluid lasts 20% longer.”
“We have the widest range in the region.”
“Line three stands idle for half a shift every time the fluid is changed. Let's work out what that costs you a year.”
“You order from five suppliers. How many hours a week does that cost your purchasing team?”
The narrower, the stronger. And the rarer.
Your line for the customer: “Because in your case customer's situation, our difference will bring you benefit in money or time. Let me show you with proof.”
Selling bread to retail chains and selling a CZK 20 million production line are completely different jobs. Yet both are often trained by the same trainer with the same slides. Start with what you sell.
Click a market. The more people decide and the bigger the deal, the more consultative selling pays off.
Tool: tactics by market
Pick what you sell.
The same presentation thrills one customer and wears out another. They don't differ in what they need. They differ in how they decide.
Psychologists David Merrill and Roger Reid described behaviour on two axes: whether people tend to ask or to tell, and whether they control their emotions or show them. The result is four styles. They aren't boxes, just a hint at how to talk so the other person actually hears you.
That's why “what this costs you every month” works better than “how much you'll save”.
Tool: spot the customer type
Click the quarter that best fits the customer you're about to visit.
Robert Cialdini described six principles in Influence and added a seventh in Pre-Suasion. They only work when they are true. Invented scarcity costs you the customer for good.
You hear it every week
That's way more expensive than the competition.
Don't discount. Ask first: more expensive compared with what? Chapter 07
A discount is the most expensive argument you have. You pay for all of it out of your margin, and the customer learns that haggling with you pays off. I used to hand out discounts at the end of the month too.
A one hour meeting. Each mark is one mention of price.
Average salesperson
Top salesperson
Tool: how much more you have to sell for a discount to pay off
Set your gross margin and the discount you're discussing with the customer right now.
At a 30% margin and a 10% discount, you have to sell 50% more units to earn the same as without the discount.
| Margin / discount | 5% | 10% | 15% | 20% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20% | +33% | +100% | +300% | impossible |
| 30% | +20% | +50% | +100% | +200% |
| 40% | +14% | +33% | +60% | +100% |
| 50% | +11% | +25% | +43% | +67% |
“I can do that for you, provided you…”
The dots show what a card typically costs you. A discount always costs you the most, because every bit of it comes out of your margin.
Handled within 48 hours, replacement on the spot.
No downtime for the customer.
Extended warranty on key items.
Easier for them to justify to the boss.
A loan unit during repairs, a service check.
Operations keep running.
Free above a threshold, express to the plant or the site.
Their people don't have to fetch the goods.
Reserved stock, consignment stock.
No cash tied up in inventory.
Longer payment terms in exchange for a volume commitment.
Better cash flow than a discount.
Operator training at the customer's premises.
Fewer mistakes and claims.
Calculations, on site measurements, project documentation.
Expertise without hiring.
A trial unit or a pilot on one job.
They can test it with no risk.
Price held for six months or for the whole project.
A predictable budget.
Framework order, automatic replenishment.
Less admin.
First in line when stock is short, a direct line to you.
Certainty when others can't deliver.
You hear it every week
Just email it to me. We'll get back to you.
That isn't a no. It's fear of making the wrong choice. Chapter 08
Losing a deal to a competitor at least hurts. Far more deals you never lose. They just fade away. That took me years to understand.
Illustrative, assuming an average win rate of 26% and a no decision loss in the middle of the 40 to 60% range.
At that point the customer usually isn't doubting whether to change something. They're afraid of choosing wrong. And what do you do? You pile on arguments and more options. That's exactly how you make the fear bigger. I did it too.
You hear it every week
We already have a supplier.
Don't ask for the whole range. Ask for one item. Chapter 09
Every range has a few items the customer is happy to try, gets straight away and then reorders again and again. They're your way in to the customer who “already has a supplier”.
of the difference in how fast an innovation catches on is explained by five of its traits: advantage, compatibility, simplicity, trialability and visible results.
To Rogers' five traits I add two commercial ones from my own practice: whether the item gets used up and reordered, so the order comes in by itself, and whether the customer has nothing easy to compare its price with. A speciality that isn't in everyone's price list doesn't need a discount to sell.
Tool: speciality scorecard
Pick one item from your range and rate it from 1 to 5. The chart draws itself from your scores.
Promising. Find the trait holding it back most and work on that.
A customer relationship isn't coffee and football. It's the sum of the promises you've kept.
But watch out for a trap. In that same research, the most common type of salesperson was the relationship builder. And among the stars it was the rarest of all, just 7%. Customers aren't loyal to the salesperson who is pleasant. They're loyal to the one who makes them better. For a long time I was the pleasant one.
On top is what builds trust. Below is what divides it: the more obvious it is that you're mainly thinking about your commission, the smaller the result.
If you drive wherever the last phone call sends you, you end up with a car full of miles and an empty month.
A forty hour week. Each square is one hour.
Rank customers by potential, not by today's turnover, and certainly not by how much you enjoy visiting them. Anchor each day with one key meeting and plan the other visits around it.
You hear it from yourself too
Nobody listens to me in meetings anyway.
Start with the conclusion. The rest is structure. Chapter 12
You're selling even when you stand in front of management, your team or a customer with a projector behind you. If you can't say it clearly, nobody listens, even when you're right.
Listeners remember the beginning and the end. Don't put a warm up there.
Workbooks
One book is already on sale. The second one and the full Salesperson's Handbook in PDF are still being written. Sign up and you'll get them first, at an introductory price.
Book, PDF, 104 pages, written in Czech
How a price is built, where the margin leaks out of it and how to defend it in front of a buyer. Thirteen parts, twelve stories from the field and appendices with formulas you can use tomorrow. The book itself is in Czech.
You don't know me yet, so I carry the risk. If the book helps you move forward, send me a top-up of CZK 1,000 via the QR code at the end. If it doesn't, you pay nothing more.
3. Pay by QR code or a standard bank transfer
Scan the code in your Czech banking app and everything fills in by itself. For a standard transfer, please copy the variable symbol exactly, because that's how I match the payment to you. I'll send the PDF to the email you gave as soon as the payment arrives.
Need an invoice for your company? Write to info@lukasgerhardt.cz.
In progress
The second book. About the moment there's a number on the table that makes your palms sweat. How to prepare for a big deal, how not to wreck it with a discount out of fear and how to take it all the way to a signature.
Also in progress: the Salesperson's Handbook in PDF
Game
A 3D simulation of one morning at a customer's site. You're selling an industrial component that costs eighteen percent more than the competition. You have three and a half hours and the whole site before the buyer sits down with you.
Everything that could justify that price is lying around the company. Nobody will hand it to you, though. One path starts with your product and almost always ends in a discount. The other starts with the customer.
You're the supplier. At noon you sit down with a buyer who has three quotes on the desk, and yours is the most expensive. Until then the whole site is open to you: the warehouse, the workshop, accounts, marketing and the owner's office. The more you find out, the more you have to argue with. Whatever you don't find out, you pay for with a discount.
On a computer, click where you want to go and click a person to talk to them. On mobile, there's a joystick bottom left and an E button. It takes about fifteen minutes.
FAQ
If your question isn't here, write to me. I'll answer like a normal human being, with no sales fluff.
For you, if you sell and want to do it better. Field sales reps, key account managers, retail salespeople, business owners and freelancers who sell for themselves. And managers who need their word to carry weight in a meeting.
It doesn't matter whether you've been selling for one year or fifteen. A beginner gets a foundation to build on. An experienced salesperson usually gets the most valuable thing of all: finding out which habits they've carried since day one, and which of them are costing them money today.
Because in a group a good idea becomes a habit. Tell six people on Tuesday that you'll try a new question with a customer on Thursday, and next Tuesday someone will ask how it went. On your own you can talk yourself out of anything. In front of a group you can't.
The second reason is practice. When you rehearse a conversation with me, you know what I want to hear. When you rehearse it with someone from a completely different industry, it's much closer to a real customer. And the third reason: you'll hear how people from building materials, IT or retail handle the same objection. No single trainer can give you ideas like that.
At least two, at most seven. No more, because everyone has to get their turn every evening. I put groups together so that direct competitors never end up in the same one. That means you can talk openly about your customers and your prices.
Whatever is said about specific companies and numbers stays in the group. We agree on that at the very start of the first evening.
Four weeks in a row, always on the same day. You choose between Tuesday and Thursday, always starting at 17:00 and finishing at 20:00. That's 12 hours of training in total. In the calendar on the form you pick the day of the first session, and the other three are always exactly one week later.
The evening slot is deliberate. I work flat out during the day myself, and I know you do too. This way you don't have to take time off or explain to anyone why you're not out in the field.
Let me know as soon as you can. If possible, you join the other group that week, Thursday instead of Tuesday or the other way round. If that doesn't work, I'll send you what we covered and the field task, so you don't miss anything.
One session is easy to catch up on. More than that is a shame, because the whole programme is built on coming back to things every week.
We start with how last week's task went. What worked, what didn't and why. That's often the most valuable part of the whole evening. Then comes a new topic, but briefly: a few minutes of theory and straight into real examples.
Most of the time we practise. In pairs and threes, on your real customers and situations. You play the salesperson, then the customer, then you observe the others. The last part of the evening belongs to your topics: a specific customer, a proposal or a negotiation coming up. At the very end everyone says what they'll try next week. And a week later we find out. You'll find the minute by minute breakdown above in the Evening by evening section.
Yes, and it'll be fine. Practice is the only thing that turns advice you've read into a skill. But nobody throws you in at the deep end. We start in pairs, where nobody else can hear you, and you only go in front of the whole group when you're ready.
Role play isn't theatre. The point is that the line you want to say to a customer gets said out loud for the first time here, not in front of them.
Yes. The principles are the same, only the way you prove value is different. With services the customer is buying a promise, so we work more with references, with describing the outcome and with reducing the risk on their side.
Yes. The fourth evening includes a block on presentation skills: how to build a message so that even someone half listening understands it, how to speak in front of management or a customer, and how to finish so that a decision leaves the room, not the words “we'll discuss it”.
It works best in person, because live practice is priceless. If the group has people from different corners of the country, we can run it online. You'll get the details as soon as I confirm your date.
Yes. The price of CZK 14,900 includes VAT. I'll invoice the company: in that case don't pay by QR, just send me the billing details. If you need a few sentences for your boss on what you'll learn, I'm happy to send them.
Yes, and I'm counting on it. The last part of every evening is reserved for what you want to work on: a negotiation coming up, a proposal that's gone quiet, or a customer you just can't crack. The group becomes your practice customer before you go in for real. If you mention the topic on the form in advance, I can prepare for it.
After you send the form, you get the payment details with a QR code. Your place in the group is reserved once the payment arrives.
A group opens as soon as it has at least two people. If your group doesn't open, you get another date or a full refund.
It depends on the size of the team, the number of days and how much preparation your market needs. Use the form to tell me what you're dealing with, how many salespeople you have and what they sell. I'll send you a proposed scope and a price, so you have something to take to management.
Yes. I'm happy to open a closed group for your team. It works just like a regular group, except the people in it are colleagues and we can work directly with your customers and your price list. We'll agree the dates for that group together.
Always built around your market. Before the training I talk to management and a few of your salespeople, so I know what you sell, who to, and where deals fall through. A team selling to construction companies needs something completely different from a team in retail. You won't get generic training with slides about the “five steps of selling” from me.
By not ending it on the last day. The team gets a handbook with questions and arguments for their own portfolio, and after six weeks I come back for a follow up day. We go through what stuck in practice, what fell apart and what needs fine tuning. Without follow up, most of what people learn fades within a few weeks, so I never skip it.
On the website you get the most important part of every chapter, plus charts you can click through. The full Salesperson's Handbook in PDF has worksheets, conversation scripts and answers to the most common objections. It's a lot of work, which is why I don't give it away for free. It's coming out soon at an introductory price, and anyone who signs up gets it first.
I'm finishing both. If you sign up in the Workbooks section, you'll be the first to hear and you'll get the introductory price. I'll use your email for this and nothing else. No newsletter.
You pay CZK 290 incl. VAT by QR payment or bank transfer, and the PDF lands in your inbox as soon as the payment arrives. If the workbook helps you, at the end you send the remaining CZK 1,000 via a QR code. If it doesn't, you pay nothing more. I carry the risk, because you don't know me yet.
It runs right in your browser, on a computer or a phone, with nothing to install. You're a supplier and you have one morning inside the customer's company to find out what will justify your higher price. It takes about fifteen minutes and has nine endings, depending on how you run your discovery.
Point your phone camera at the QR code in the Contact section and tap the prompt that appears. The contact goes straight into your phone. On a mobile you can tap the Save contact to phone button.
The monthly group programme runs in Czech. Company training and talks are available in English too, just mention it in the form.