Seth Godin Post Game Show for April 5, 2006:
Great question from The Great One today, which is, "what's the hardest thing in your business?" My blogging "business" revolves around the world of sales, so let me address the question from that perspective.
The five "hardest things" in sales, from my observation, are:
- Keeping a positive, optimistic attitude.
- Being organized.
- Being persistent.
- Being original.
- Asking for the sale.
Note what is not on the list...
- Getting enough training.
- Getting enough leads.
- Having enough meetings.
- Having the right tools.
- Getting better brochures.
- Having a bigger expense account.
...and I could go on. The excuses sales people come up with can be never ending.
In summary, the hardest thing in sales is to develop a dominating personal sales business. Not enough sales professionals look at themselves as their own business...but, they are. I find that 9 out of 10 sales reps have the mentality that their just "working" for a company, when in fact in the eyes of most of their customers they are the company. Those same 9 out of 10 sales reps have miserable attitudes, they're not positive, they are not organized in any way, they give up too easily, they all have the same boring approach, and they are deathly afraid of asking their customer for the business.
Hey, as the saying goes, "if it ('it' being sales, in this discussion) were easy, everybody would do it". The truth is, its easy if you manage to do the first five things that I mentioned. But, 9 out of 10 sales reps don't.
Doing the first five things means doing the hardest five things. And most sales people don't want to do "hard". Which is why most sales staffs have huge annual turnover, and spend so much time and money trying to train new sales reps.
Don't be a "rep". Be a "professional". Do the five hard things so that you can be the 1 out of the 10 that is happy, successful, and wealthy.
Dan, I resonate with your list and see from my work the need for each of these -- thanks for the inspiration to stay on tack with winning points!
Guess I'd add "see a thing from behind the eyeballs of the other person."
That could be the customer who needs a break, or the managers who would be impacted by how we do sales....
Thanks for a shot at adding 2-bits to a million dollar list:-)
Posted by: Ellen Weber | April 6, 2006 4:38 AM | Permalink to Comment