I will share a secret of my sales career success. If you must know, the secret is the ultimate ingredient that contribute to it. Now it is my honour to share it with you.
Since this is going to be the most important selling skill you will ever learn in your life, I must warn you that it can make or break your sales career, at the very least. On the other side of the coin, it could be a career-threatening gig, if you are bad at this!
Learn this, practice this. Make it as your lifelong mission to perfect this. I can promise you now that once you have perfected this skill, you will never ever have to beg for a purchase order again. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a selling skill, at the stage of improving on the product knowledge or even your people skill is rusty, I guarantee that you can still convince people to buy from you.
This is just a very simple skill, but not easy. It requires a strong determination and a lot of hard work too to perfect this. But I promise you this… everybody can do this well. The operative word here is, WILL.
How bad do you want to change the result of your sales numbers? What does it really mean to you when you are at the pinnacle of your sale success? How bad do you want to change your life? Are you ready to learn and work on just ONE thing that can make a world of difference to your life?
“Ok, this sounds like a hard work. I will just be contented with what I have now. It is ok for me not to be at the top of my career,” you say. I hate to burst your bubble but it is only fair that I warn you. Being bad at this one skill, will not only make you a poor salesperson, it can ruin your life too! Yes, you heard me right.
Now… what is this one skill that I am talking about?
Positive Thinking!
~ Yawn. “Old school”, you said. Let me put it on record here, that it doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. It will affect you just like how gravity affects you. Don’t’ believe in gravity? Try jumping down from a tall building, see if your belief matters!
If you have done that plain old telemarketing, you will relate a lot what I am going to share. The day when I went bankrupt I had only this as my best income generator. I picked up the phone and started talking to random strangers. More than talking, I needed to be able to build enough trust over the phone, within the span of 5 – 10 mins, that they would pull their credit card out for me. I was paid a commission in cash on a weekly basis as there was no such thing as a basic salary. So, you can imagine the consequences if I were to screw up just one week. That also means that every single day is a battle to the finish line. One bad day is all it takes to make you worry about how your life is going to turn out to be next week.
I was new to the telemarketing stunt at that time. I was making enough commission just by sheer determination and a lot of hard work. Along the way, with many ups and downs in my incoming sales outcome, I started to notice that my mood, really have direct consequences to my sales that morning, even that day. I started paying a very close attention to it. I tested, I experimented. Until I am totally convinced, no doubt, that my thinking, my mood does have a direct impact on the result.
When I was in a good mood, everything will turn out to be positive. Sales for that day will somehow turn extremely great too. When I was in a bad mood, feeling down, bitter, angry, victimized, that was it. The result of all my sales work will go south, bad. Just as simple as that. Nothing fancy.
As any bad day, bad morning, bad afternoon came about, it will mean that a huge lot of difference will definitely affect my income that week. I realised that I have to do something about it.
Let’s get real here. We cannot avoid negative feelings. It is all around us. You get up in the morning and somehow just because you aren’t able to locate your favourite slipper, you’ll go mad. The negative feeling creeps in. You’re walking to work, the street is so crowded that day and the person in front of you walks really slow with his eyes glued to the phone, and you think he is such an inconsiderate dude. The negative feeling took over. Don’t even get me started about peak hours driving and all the news in the TV and the newspaper. My point is that in every minute of your life, a negative aura of interaction will pour its ways into you. You cannot avoid that.
But you can build a shield to cover yourself against that. You can have an antidote against those negative elements surrounding you. Let me show you how.
Here we go!
The Shield
- Keep reading, listening and watching positive, uplifting and inspiring books, audios and videos. When you fill your mind with all these, it is like building a shield around you. When you are down, you remember the inspiring stories that you just read. The author went through challenging time before he finally made it. It may be the story that reminds you of things that you may need to do to turn the situation around. It is like daily gym routine. You don’t immediately get to see the result, but it all adds up.
- Get yourself surrounded by successful and positive people. Your managers, your bosses, the top sales guy, business owners that you meet. Ask them about their success stories. Have real and genuine conversations. When you do that, people will open up and are more than willing to share with you their stuff. During challenging times, those stories and sharing will help you to march forward. You can tell yourself that you are not alone. You will tell yourself that the negativity is nothing new and you have heard them before. Despite that, it did not stop those great people.
- Don’t read anything negative. Don’t listen to negativity. Don’t entertain anything that is negative. Why is this important? Your mind is your factory that manufactures products according to your raw materials. Garbage in, garbage out. I need you to read The Magic of Thinking Big just in case if you haven’t. You will learn how to manage all these, with very specific strategies. From now on, you may want to store more positivity in your storehouse, as inviting negativity will likely sabotage your own success.
The Antidote
- The books that you read, the audios that you listened to, the videos that you watched, keep a piece of them in you. Save the part that moved you so much that you cried, you cringe, you got really emotional about them. When you are just being swarmed with a whole lot of stuff that didn’t go your way that day, pull those up, dwell into them. They will remind you the reasons why you’re doing what you are doing. They will remind you of the want too.
- If you are in the sales industry, make sure you make frequent contacts with your best customers. They will help to positively impact your sales outcome. They will help to refer their friends to you. They’ll share all the positive vibes when you talk to them. In the time of need, you can just pick up the phone, give them a call, knowing that they will have nothing but the best and positive words to share with you. These remind you that all isn’t that bad after all. You can still do it because you have done it before. This will bring your focus back to the right path. You know what needs to be done repeat that success.
- Action. Yes. Work harder, make more calls and meet more customers. Find some projects that add value to people you come into contact with, to your organization, to your family. When you act, stop thinking about negativity. Your brain will automatically change to solution mode, focusing on possibilities than limitations.
This action plan may sound simple but it will take a lot of determination and dedication out of you. The challenging part about it is that you cannot stop doing it. The only way to get good at it is to keep doing it, keep practising it daily. When you stop practising this, you are not going to a standstill but you’re going backwards! This journey is like walking on a fast travelator, that moves in the opposite direction. You need to up your ante against the odds and move quicker than that travelator to reach the end of it.
After all, it has been said:
The battle is won or lost, six inches between our ears.
