RULE # 1: DEVELOP A GREAT ATTITUDE AND DO MORE THAN YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO. We are all faced with moments of truth … intersections of Success Drive and Losing Lane. The best way to handle them is to go against the grain … to challenge yourself. Be known for making one more call, staying five minutes over, bringing in one more sale, stopping by one more business, sending one more card. That small degree of separation will be what catapults your results.
RULE # 2: GOALS SHOULD BE IN WRITING. There should be specific, practical, achievable and measurable goals. Then there should be some “blow- it-off-the-hinges goals” to stretch yourself beyond today’s reality. Before reading further, take out a sheet of paper and jot down the first twenty five goals that you can think of. No cheating. This exercise is critical. Okay, now that you’ve listed twenty five goals, no matter how far out they may be, categorize them by financial, spiritual, personal, relational, and so on. How many were financial versus spiritual? Financial versus personal? Financial versus relational. If financial trumped everything else, that says something. If it’s spiritual, that says something. Relational, that says something, too. Don’t miss the underlying message there.
RULE # 3: SEE YOURSELF AS SUCCESSFUL. Have your goals in front of you, then visualize yourself achieving them. Maybe it’s a personal achievement (the best husband, wife, parent, child you can be – and what that would look like). Maybe it’s spiritual (the person you’d become if you were where you should/could be spiritually). Maybe it’s financial (the house, the car, the college, the savings account(s), the investment(s), the contribution you’re able to make back to community. Playing the part mentally in vivid detail can have amazing results. When visualizing, think of what “successful” people do in that area. Do that.
RULE # 4: DON’T ASSUME. Don’t limit or minimize yourself, your prospects or your clients. I’m amazed at the missed opportunities, lost relationships and minimized successes caused by assumptions that were actually hallucinations!
RULE #5: BE SELF-MOTIVATED. No one else can really do it. They might be able to manage behavior, but it’s up to you to motivate yourself long term. As a result of having goals, it gets easier (or at least seems to) as successes and time passes. You have to get through the stuff to earn the right to be there.
RULE #6: STAY IN CONTROL. People judge you based on THEIR principles and philosophy. Don’t take it personal. More importantly, don’t be delusional. If you lose control, get it back or else just stop. You won’t make the sale or reach the goal anyway … better to save it for another time.
RULE #7: CONSTANTLY PRACTICE AND PREPARE. It would be difficult to find a professional in any sport that doesn’t practice for hours on end – despite being elite in their sport. It would be difficult to find a professional band, speaker, dancer, etc. who doesn’t constantly hone their craft, even though they are already world class. Yet too many sales people blow the cob webs off their beat up presentation and wing it when they are making a presentation to a prospect.
RULE #8: SEE AND TALK TO MORE PEOPLE THAN ANYONE ELSE. It IS a numbers game, but not for the sake of quantity over quality. As my good friend Chris Rollins says – you can try to make up for it in numbers, but if you can’t sell, is that really going to matter? Where the numbers do come into play are that they can be predictable (i.e. ”If my numbers say that for every XXX calls I make I will ultimately make XXX sales, and I want to double my sales … then logic says if I double my calls, I will double my sales”). You have to earn that right, though.
But, as important, numbers are also a factor in that more numbers equal more “No’s,” which represent more opportunity to get better. That, in turn, leads to less “No’s” over time!
Stay tuned for Part 2!
Excerpt from John Patrick’s eBook entitled Sales Tips & Tools, which can be found on Amazon.