THREE

Personal Management Skills: The Inner Game

To get into the top 20 percent in your field, and then the top 10 percent, 5 percent, and even one percent—where the big money is—you have to have everything going for you. The world of sales today, in any field, with any product or service, is more competitive than it has ever been before, except for tomorrow and the next day, and the day after that. Your goal must be to win this competition.

My favorite word in describing success is clarity. In my estimation, clarity accounts for 95 percent of your success and achievement in anything that you attempt to do, in both your personal and your business life.

The number one reason why some people are more successful than others is because they are absolutely clear about who they are, what they want, and exactly what they have to do to get it. Clarity requires a tremendous amount of thinking and rethinking. As Thomas Edison said, “The hardest work in the world is thinking, which is why most people never do it.”

Set Big Goals for Yourself

Begin by setting clear personal income goals for yourself on a monthly and annual basis. How much do you want to earn each month? How much do you want to earn each year? These are your targets. Everything you do must be aimed at hitting or exceeding these targets.

One of my sales students was already reasonably successful. Nonetheless, she set a goal to double her income in the next twelve months. She then began exploring all the things that she could do to sell and earn twice as much. One of her friends suggested that the simplest way would be for her to double the size of each sale that she was making.

That idea had never occurred to her. She began looking around to determine what kind of customers made larger purchases than the customers she was selling to at the moment did. Over the next year, she reoriented her entire sales process so that she was selling more, and more often, to bigger and better customers. By the end of the year, her average sale was double what it had been at the beginning of the year. She was still working the same number of hours and making the same number of sales, but each one was twice as large as the sales she had been making before.

Know Your Ratios

Once you have determined how much you want to sell and earn, you must then determine the exact sales activities that you will have to engage in to earn that amount.

Here is the great discovery: When and where you make individual sales is largely out of your control. But your actions are completely under your control. The good news is that, by controlling your sales activities, you indirectly control your sales results.

The three primary activities of sales success are: prospecting, presenting, and closing.

Begin by determining how many new prospects you will have to contact and talk to each day and each week to achieve your desired sales results. One of the first acts you engage in as a sales professional is to keep accurate records of the number of calls you make each day and each week.

Look at the number of presentations or face-to-face meetings that you set up as a result of your prospecting. For example, let us say that you have to call on twenty new people to get five face-to-face appointments. (This is not an unusual number in a competitive market.)

The next part of selling is following up and closing the sale and keeping track: Let us say that you have to make twenty initial calls to get five appointments, and you have to make five presentations to get two prospective customers for follow-up. From these two prospective customers you will get one sale, on average.

Now you know your ratios. They are 20:5:2:1. You have to make twenty calls on the front end to get one sale on the back end.

Now, calculate the average size of each of your sales and your average personal commission or earnings on each sale. With these numbers, you now have clear targets to aim at.

Your strategy going forward is to, first of all, keep your funnel full. Make sure that you continually feed your “sales system” with a steady stream of new prospects. Second of all, resolve to improve—to get better in each of the critical areas of prospecting, presenting, and closing the sale. Call on better prospects and sort them out faster. Make better and more effective presentations. Follow up and close more sales. Improve your ratios in each area.

Set Your Priorities

The essence of personal management really comes down to your ability to set priorities and to stick to them. Use the 80/20 rule. Remember that 80 percent of your results will come from 20 percent of your activities. Keep focusing on the most valuable use of your time.

If clarity is the first word in personal success, then focus is the second word. Resolve to become results-oriented as opposed to activity-oriented. Focus on the results you want to accomplish, and of those, the most important results.

Develop a sense of urgency and a bias for action. A sense of urgency is one of the rarest qualities in business, or in any field. Every top salesperson has a sense of urgency. Move quickly whenever you have an idea or see an opportunity. Sometimes a few minutes will make all the difference between a major sale and nothing at all.

Keep asking, “Why am I on the payroll?”

The truth is that you are on the payroll to make sales. Your job is to prospect, present, and close. It is to get sales results—morning, noon, and night. Continue to ask yourself the magic question: “Is what I am doing right now leading to a sale?”

If what you are doing right now is not leading to a sale, stop doing it immediately and start doing things that are sales-achieving rather than just tension-relieving.You are the president of your own Professional Sales Corporation.

You are in charge of your own career. You are responsible for everything that you are and everything that you accomplish. Avoid the trap of the low performer who talks a lot but actually does little.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. Resolve today to keep an accurate record of your sales activities. How many calls do you make each day? How many customers do you meet with each day? How many sales do you make each day or week? How much do you earn per sale?

2. Set priorities on your work, and always ask, “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?”