TWO
Stay Enthusiastic
The 80/20 Rule applies to successful selling. Most of your success—fully 80 percent and maybe even more—will be determined by your attitude, your personality, and your level of motivation.
It has been said that the critical variable in a sales conversation is a “transfer of enthusiasm.” The sale takes place when you transfer your enthusiasm and belief in the goodness and value of your product or service into the mind of the customer. Like an electrical connection, when the spark of enthusiasm passes from you to your customer, the sale is made.
Enthusiasm is the key to establishing good relationships with buyers and closing sales. You need to be enthusiastic about yourself, your product, and your company to be able to transfer enthusiasm to another person. This enthusiasm is something you develop, like physical fitness. No one is born with it naturally.
Keep Your Energy High
There are several techniques you can employ each day to develop and maintain high levels of enthusiasm and selling energy.
Have Positive Expectations
This is one of the greatest motivators of all. Your expectations determine your attitude. And your attitude determines how you treat other people, and how they respond to you.
You develop an attitude of positive expectations by always expecting to do well. Expect that each person you talk to is a potential prospect. Expect that people will like you and be open to your presentation. Believe in yourself and your ability to be a top performer in your field.
Use Positive Self-Talk
Talk to yourself in a positive way all the time. Fully 95 percent of your emotions are determined by how you talk to yourself on an ongoing basis. Successful people make a habit of deliberately filling their minds with positive statements that are consistent with the way they want to be perceived, and the goals they want to achieve.
Successful salespeople love their work. They believe in their product or service. They are committed to their companies and to their customers. As a result, they continually reinforce these commitments in their minds and resist negative experiences by repeating, “I love my work! I love my work! I love my work!”
Practice Positive Visualization
Feed your mind continually with clear mental pictures of the person you want to be, doing what you want to do. “What you see is what you get.”
In sport, and in sales, the regular practice of the “mental rehearsal” is a powerful tool you can use to keep yourself positive and motivated, and performing at your best, all day long. In a mental rehearsal, you close your eyes and create a clear picture of yourself as the best person you can be, selling with the highest level of effectiveness that you can imagine. Each time you replay this picture in your mind, it is accepted as a command by your subconscious. When you go into the actual sales situation, your subconscious mind will give you the energy, enthusiasm, and positive attitude consistent with your mental picture. This technique can help you more than anything else to be successful.
Consume Positive Mental Food
You know that if you eat healthy, nutritious food, you will have more energy and will perform better throughout the day. In the same way, when you feed your mind with positive mental food—what we call mental protein—you will think with greater clarity and feel better about yourself all day long.
Here are three things that you can do to improve your mind, feel better about yourself, and move rapidly toward joining the top 20 percent in the sales field:
1. Read for thirty to sixty minutes each day. Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. Get the best sales books that you can and, for an hour each morning, read up on the best sales methodologies, strategies, and techniques ever developed. Read newsletters, articles, and magazines on selling.
2. Listen to educational CDs and audio books. In your car, use your smartphone to listen and learn as you drive to appointments. Turn your car into a “classroom on wheels.” As Zig Ziglar said, “Enroll in automobile university and attend full-time for the rest of your career.”
3. Attend every seminar that you can. Resolve today to attend four seminars each year, or about one every three months. Sit in the front row and take good notes. Talk to the instructor or speaker and ask questions. Take the time to meet the other people who are attending and ask them what they have learned that is most important.
When you return home from a seminar, review your notes completely—ideally, once a week for the first month. Think continually in terms of the specific actions that you can take to implement the ideas that you have just learned. Make the seminar a rich and rewarding experience for your career.
Get Around Positive People
The people you associate with have an inordinate effect on your thinking and on your emotions. For this reason, resolve to get around winners. Associate with positive people who are going somewhere in their careers. As Zig Ziglar said, “You cannot fly with the eagles if you continue to scratch with the turkeys.”
One of my students told me how he went from the bottom to the top of his sales force. When he began as a junior salesman, he would hang out with the other junior salespeople, who spent most of their time in the office shuffling their business cards and talking about what they were going to do.
He noticed that the top salespeople were seldom in the office, and when they were, they were busy making calls and organizing presentations. So he did something that changed his life. He went up to one of the top salespeople and asked for advice on managing his time.
The top salesman, surprised at this request, because it was so rare, showed him how he managed his time each day. The new salesman did exactly what the top salesman was doing, and within a week he noticed that his sales activity and results were improving.
He then began asking the other top salespeople for advice on what programs to listen to, what to read, what to say in a sales conversation, and so on. In every case, the top salespeople were helpful. It was no surprise that within six months, he was also one of the top salespeople. He was now associating with the top people in his company. They got together on a regular basis to talk about different ways to improve their sales. Within a year he was one of the top salesmen in his company, and he never looked back.
Become an Expert in Your Field
Study your products and services carefully and read your brochures from cover to cover. Become so knowledgeable about what you sell that you could give a presentation from memory if you lost all your sales materials.
Study your business and industry. Study your competitors. Understand the products and services they sell, and how what you sell is different from and superior to their offerings. The better you know your products, services, competitors, and the market in general, the more confidence you will have and the more respected you will be by your customers.
Get Serious About Your Work
Remember that, as a professional salesperson, you are a member of a profession. When you rise to the top of your field, you can earn as much or more than a doctor, dentist, architect, or engineer—people with many years of university qualifications.
Professionals at the top of their fields invest a lot of time keeping current with what is going on in their industries. They take their work seriously. They resolve to excel—to be better than their competitors. They want to be known as the top people in their fields. Above all, professionals are committed to doing an excellent job in their work, and to continually improving, getting better and better every day and every week. So should you.
ACTION EXERCISES
1. Resolve today to engage in personal development as a lifelong practice. Begin acquiring books on sales and resolve to read one chapter each day, from now on, for the rest of your sales career.
2. Say these words: I like myself and I love my work! Repeat this sentence over and over again throughout the day, first thing in the morning, and whenever you have a disappointment or a setback.