Do You Believe
To be a true Professional, you need to believe in what you’re offering your Customers. Be honest, does your product or service fill a need? Can you really make a difference with your product line up? Do the services that you offer your Customers really live up to their expectations? If not, go back two steps and rethink what you’re offering your Customers. Be honest enough with yourself to know that dishonesty will only come back to haunt you. Usually when you least expect it. Build your reputation in terms of your personal integrity. Build your call scripts in your own words, and be clear, concise and forthright about them. Under commit and over deliver. You will earn lifetime Customers this way.
In our industry, there are a lot of characters who offer their products to unsuspecting Customers who wind up buying a bill of goods that they have no need for. Ask questions of your Customer to determine what they truly need and offer them a solution that will truly fit their needs. Never compromise your true beliefs just for the sake of a sale. It may get you to quota today. But by tomorrow, you’ll feel less than zero because you’ll know you did the wrong thing. We already know that sales people have a bad rap. Be the Sales Professional who has integrity and the guts to show it and believe in it. Believe in yourself and your products. Or move on.
Now that we have established that belief in your company is essential the next perhaps most important part is belief in yourself, with out that leap of faith and self confidence success is impossible. A large part of self confidence is what we tell ourselves. If we tell ourselves we can’t then we can’t if we tell ourselves we can, we can accomplish. Think about the difference of people who are told they can achieve something and those who are told they can’t there is always one who beats the odds but sadly people place a lot of value on the words of others, many times it is a well founded decision after all that is how we know most everything we’ve ever learned but the down side is if you are not surrounded with encouragement it’s tough. It makes for a tough life, both personally and professionally.
In the business of sales you have to run through brick walls on an almost daily basis. You have to find people who you don’t know and ask them to talk to you about how you can help them. You have to stand out from the others in the proverbial herd that are vying for their time and convince them through hard work and planning that not just the product you have is a better fit for them but you are a better fit for them. What you tell yourself you can achieve is possible with the right effort. It may at first not look exactly like what you set out for but have goals. Write them down and look at them. It makes them real but just like everything else in life put a time limit on them and reassess them once a qtr. I didn’t say change them but reassess them. If they need to be changed commit to doing that not because it is too hard to get where you’re going but because the in between steps matter and a lot of the time those details get filled in along the journey to make the path easier.
Negative people are killers- in ice hockey there are two a sayings when discussing a players skills “I’d have a drink with him” or “He can play” The meanings are simple the first player might be a nice guy but he doesn’t have the skills to get things done consistently when it counts. The second player is the one who is on the ice and rises to the occasion every time it really matters. Negative people, the whiners and complainers are not the ones who get it done in business, they might be great people with a lot of redeeming qualities but you want to become the go to person because you can do things that others can’t or won’t even dare to try.
Fear is a natural instinct, it in general is a good thing to have but you can’t let fear stop you from doing what you need to in business or in life for that matter. Weigh your options, commit to a path, and then drive toward the result. You might not get there every time but you’ll never get there if you don’t try.
So other people can and have let you down, it doesn’t mean not to believe in and trust others. Most people are well intentioned. One area that even top performing reps fall down on is trying to control everything, yes it is your client, yes they decided to buy from you but all of those other resources in the book that were talked about, you need to let them do their job too, a large part of which comes from you understanding enough about what they do to make sure your client has the proper expectations of how things are going to flow. Look at your business like you own a barber shop, and take care of every single task that ownership requires personally. You can only give so many hair cuts in a day. Over time you get more efficient and deliver the same quality but eventually there comes a point where you have to sacrifice the quality of your service if you want to fit more people in. So you open earlier but then that start to take a toll on your attitude, there is after all more to life than work. But you want to grow your client base so you hire a few people to take care of things like cleaning and accounting, it gives you more time to focus on your task at hand, cutting hair. Maybe somewhere down the road you’ll hire another person to cut hair too, sure they might not have clients but some of yours may go to them if you’re too busy. They are still your clients but they have trusted the same person you have to deliver the service. In a sales world that person could be a sales assistant taking routine quoting and order entry away from you, not to steal an account or diminish your value but so you can spend more of your time doing what you do best. That person could also be the installation staff, or other support anywhere from shipping to accounting or marketing that makes sure your customer has the exact experience that you as a team worked together to create and deliver.
Always remember, there’s no I in TEAM! Together, each accomplishes magic. The true meaning of TEAM.
A personal story is that I use a lot of self effacing humor when I work with people, it’s often a way to disarm them and break down barriers because like every sales person, occasionally ego can get in the way. So instead I say thinks like “ well I’m not that bright so explain it to me again.” I don’t really doubt my own abilities but some times I just don’t get it and want to, and sometimes I’m checking the answer knowing that something was missing in the first explanation that gets included or better defined the second time through. Once after a big meeting that I left with an even bigger signed contract with one of my new client’s staff pulled me aside and said something like “You really are quite capable, stop doubting yourself.” I thanked them for the input and as I got to the car thought about how astute she was and wondered why she felt the need to talk to me afterword. It was an eye opening experience how confidence plays a part in everyone world.
