After teaching 8 hours of delivering sales training and other classes in the last two days, a thought hit me after talking to an attendee.
Here’s an idea for you to ponder today:
Some of the greatest ideas, sales systems, personal development strategies and business growth plans… are really SIMPLE!
If we allow ourselves, we can walk out of a training session, or finish listening to a Podcast or reading a book, and think “that was simple”, “I already knew that”, “that is nothing new”, etc. You may feel you spent time seeking professional development and in the end you didn’t learn anything new.
You would be wrong, and you’d also be missing out on opportunities to increase your long term sales success.
What you really need to ask yourself is:
Have I executed what I learned?
If you already know that following up with leads and prospects yields results, have you followed up with every lead in your pipeline this week? If not, why not? It isn’t because of lack of sales skills or lack of product knowledge - it’s lack of execution. You just gotta DO IT.
Is it part of my weekly plan?
Maybe you made those calls and touched all those leads last week. Awesome! Did you do it this week as well? Do you have unmovable appointments with yourself next week to focus on making those calls and pushing the sales process along? Do you have a list of specific names you’ll call during those unmovable appointments? In other words, is making those calls a HABIT? It has been said that we make our habits and our habits then make us. What do your habits say about who you are?
If I do execute the ideas, can I take them to a deeper level?
Let’s continue with the same example of follow-up calls: the more you do, and the more you reflect on your results, the more you tweak your “how”, or your technique. There’s DOING the calls, and there’s HOW you do the calls. A good salesperson spends time making their follow-up calls religiously. But the more you do them, make mistakes, reflect on the mistakes, and adjust, the better you’ll get at your sales job. Over time, that compounded growth will seem miraculous.
Let’s not allow our egos to stop us from growth! The English writer Samuel Johnson said, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” You probably do know what you need to know to be successful… so now listen to an instructor, speaker, or author “remind” you, then go out and DO it.
Let’s all grow to achieve our purposes!
