Seth Godin's blog post replying to a frustrated marketer has lots of good applications for today's sales professional. Seth took the angle of analyzing the reader's business itself; I'll address it strictly from the viewpoint of the sales professional.
First, a key sentence from Seth's post (and you really should click here for the whole post):
"The right strategy makes any tactic work better. The right strategy puts less pressure on executing your tactics perfectly.
Here's the obligatory January skiing analogy: Carving your turns better is a tactic. Choosing the right ski area in the first place is a strategy. Everyone skis better in Utah, it turns out.
If you are tired of hammering your head against the wall, if it feels like you never are good enough, or that you're working way too hard, it doesn't mean you're a loser. It means you've got the wrong strategy.
It takes real guts to abandon a strategy, especially if you've gotten super good at the tactics. That's precisely the reason that switching strategies is often such a good idea. Because your competition is afraid to."
I'll go a step further in talking to you, an individual sales professional who is trying to build a career or even your own business. If you're struggling in the sales profession you are in, it might be that you're just in the wrong type of sales environment. A friend of mine struggled greatly with outside B2B sales. Now, he works in an inside sales environment and is one of the best in his office. He changed his strategy, not his tactics. Plenty of his fellow struggling co-workers were too afraid to make that change themselves...so, the change was made for them in the form of being canned.
If you find yourself performing below your expectations and not making the kind of commissions or bonuses that you are feeling you should, evaluate your "strategy" (your current employer, your current function of sales). It may be that you are tactically superior as a salesperson, but just lack the right environment to fully succeed.
Go find the right strategy.
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