Determination Keeps You Moving Til The Victory Comes
The next submission in The Simplenomics of Sales People is without a doubt, one of the biggest single most important traits for all successful people, especially those in the sales arena.
Determination
Fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round - remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped. ~ James Corbett
Being an old boxer, like there’s any other kind, I’m always looking for quotes by the old-time boxing champions. They seem to be a lot more intellectual, a lot more balanced and a lot more interesting than today’s versions.
James Corbett summed it up pretty well, in the quote above, but I will add that the resolve to do right supplies the fuel needed for determination to take root and fire up my git-r-done muscles.
I get some sales purely thru the “will to win“. A “do or die” attitude keeps you pointing down the highway towards your next stop, even when you’d rather stop and play golf, stop and look at the sights, stop and shop or just stop.
My company expects me to keep moving and selling, so I do.
My family expects me to keep moving and selling, so I do.
My conscience expects me to keep moving and selling, so I do.
Knowing that the next call might bring a big victory keeps me moving.
Knowing that it’s the right thing to do keeps me calling when the victory doesn’t come.
Do You Have The Courage To Sell ?
The next submission in The Simplenomics of Sales People is an often misunderstood trait that is a real key for super sales people.
Courage
Not only do you have to have the courage to stand up for your company and it’s products, you have to have the courage to fight thru the constant stream on NO’s that all sales people hear.
From prospects, from current customers and from your own organization, the NO’s keep on coming !
You absolutely must be able to keep makin’ and takin’ calls, in person and on the phone, even after you have been inundated with negative vibes that started when you got out of bed and continued thru dinner.
Courage may seem to be a strange trait for sales people, but it’s high on the list of traits needed to succeed.
What Do Cadillac And FeedDemon Not Have In Common ?
There’s not many commercials that do anything at all for me anymore.
I watch little TV, except for a few selected sporting events and Survivor. Don’t ask, because I don’t know why I watch it, but I do.
Watching a little football a few minutes ago, I actually stayed there on FOX, I think, and watched a new, I guess, commercial from Cadillac.
After extolling all the virtues of the new Cadillac, the woman speaking ended with this gem:
” All that really matters is this: When you turn your car on, does it return the favor ? “
That is absolutely the best tagline I’ve heard in years and all of us who sell physical products, scratch that, a product of any kind should be reaching for that exact destination.
Why ? Because.
If your product turns your customers on, they’ll tell 10 people, who’ll tell 10 people and so on.
It also works in reverse.
My feed reader, FeedDemon, used to turn me on, but of late it’s been all jazzed up about wanting me to resubscribe to the online version, which is free, just to remain synchronized.
Synchronized ? It’s a paid for product, it shouldn’t need to synchronize with a free web-based app. That’s total nonsense and having to sit and delete feeds for an hour after it got unsynchronized was a pain in my ass and I’m delighted to tell everybody that it sucks when your time is wasted for a stupid reason.
FeedDemon doesn’t turn me on anymore. They owe me an hour.
I want it back.
Wanna Hear About My $253 Cup Of Coffee?
It’s rare for me to share any off-topic, personal life here on this blog, but I know you’ll want to read this, if only to make you happy that it wasn’t you it happened to.
Most of you know I’m a road warrior type of sales consultant. Most days see me tick off 250-350 miles a day in my ‘07 Camry.
Today I had to drive to Murray, Kentucky to meet with one prospect about his need for the products I represent.
It’s 145 miles each way. Luckily, my iPod was fully loaded with sales and marketing .mp3’s. When those run out, I’ve got Sirius Satellite Radio to fill in the time between making and taking phone calls.
After an hour or so of spittin’ and grinnin’, the prospect and I shook hands on his agreement to help line my pockets with cash and I said thanks and left. Typical day.
But, since it was almost 4 PM and it was 145 miles home, I thought I’d stop at a coffee shop I saw on the way to his office.
The traffic was so bad, I had to park on the north side of 5 lanes and hustle my 6′2″ 250 lb. frame across to the south side of the street just to get to the Murray location of Fidalgo Bay Coffee.
I ordered a White Chocolate Mocha, medium size and a sour cream scone. They quickly and cheerfully completed my order and I hustled across those 5 lanes again and started my jaunt back to the place I love, to see those who love me.
The first traffic light was half a block up and as soon as I came to a complete stop, I reached down and grabbed my heavenly little beverage and then all hell broke loose !
The rather flimsy cup, with the even flimsier lid that popped like a pre-pubescent teen’s first pimple filled my Camry’s console with several inches of steamin’ hot White Chocolate Mocha !
Even worse, that happens to be where I keep my iPod, my flash drive and my Jawbone Bluetooth earpiece !
That $3 White Chocolate Mocha had just turned into a $253 drink from Hades !
Wanna know what’s even worse ? After I used up every, single napkin in my glove compartment cleaning up the milky, brown drink of destruction, I tried the sour cream scone and it was not very good, to put it mildly.
Lesson learned. Never stop at a coffee shop that uses cheap lids that don’t have a distinctive snap when you place them on their less than stellar, somewhat flimsier cups.
The only consolation to this fiasco was when I got home and my wife told me that she had gone to a McDonald’s in our hometown this morning and the young lady who was handing her drink out the drive-thru window looked back at just the wrong time and spilled an entire Diet Dr. Pepper on her at around 8 AM. Nice way to start your day, huh ?
Good thang it wasn’t coffee 
PS - I went to that other coffee place and bought a cup of tea to compare the lids and cups and the one from that other coffee place takes more effort to remove and has a more distictive snap, making me think that it would be better and have less of a chance at having this happen.
Of course, that’s a very unscientific study, but it’s my blog, so I’m right 
Do Sales Contests Work?
Every single day I get several emails concerning sales contests. Each person is as sincere as they can be in wanting to motivate their sales force.
I’ve tried to work with a few of them, but deep down in my sales-minded heart, I knew that if the sales person wasn’t self-motivated, then there was little anyone could do to motivate them over a long enough period to count for something.
I’ve wished for enough time to research the subject properly, but you know what happens when you wish for something and not work for it.
Not much. Action beats asking almost every time. Almost.
A day or so ago, I was pleased to read an email by Dan Kennedy that said it almost exactly like I wish I’d said it.
I wrote and asked for permission to reprint it here and my request was granted, as long as I gave full credit, which I was quick to agree to.
All I ask for you to do is to consider clicking thru and signing up for Dan’s email course titled Successful Marketing Strategies, which can be found on Dan’s website. Visit his site and wait a couple of seconds and a fly-in popup will come across the screen and allow you to sign up.
I save all of Dan’s emails, as part of my swipe file and I just looked back and saw that I’ve been a subscriber since early 2004, so don’t be afraid, he won’t hurt you and his info is top notch.
Now, here’s Dan’s take on sales contests:
Do Sales Contests Work ?
In your last Success Marketing Strategy we began our discussion on sales and the management of sales people. I pointed out that in managing sales people you’ll actually be dealing with three distinctly different situations.
The first was the poor performers and all the problems that they bring to an organization. But now I would like to shift our attention to the group that is mostly ignored my management which are the high performers.
If you’re looking for a prompt increase in sales a good way to get it is to divert some attention from the mediocre group to the high performance group. It’s much easier to coach a successful person to even better performance than to get a mediocre performer to begin succeeding.
The bottom line though is that the only real motivation is self-motivation. You cannot take control of someone else’s thinking. Motivate them and keep them motivated purely through your external influence. The motivation that helps the sales professional achieve peak performance comes mostly from within.
As a manager or a business owner you should concentrate on providing an environment and an opportunity where a person can develop that self-motivation and a set of good business tools for the motivated performers use.
Accountability is also important. You need to obtain detailed, frequent reporting from your sales people that you can analyze to identify strengths and weaknesses in their performance, prospects or types of prospects being neglected, customer service problems and other situations that you can take action to prevent or correct.
Management’s toughest and most important job is the collection of accurate information about what’s actually going on out there on the sales battlefield. Some sales managers like to use special contests and incentive programs to motivate and reward their sales people.
I think the overall results of such programs are disappointing management more often than not and I believe I’ve identified one common error in structuring these programs. Many contests and incentives base the winning on end results, sales volume, number of accounts, etc. However, for a contest to serve multiple purposes, to motivate, to teach, to affect behavioral changes in the sales people it should focus more on the activities that produce desirable results than on the results themselves.
For example, contest points might better be based on the number of complete presentations made to qualified prospects than on the number of new accounts put on the books.
Dan would go on to say that he’ll be giving me more info about increasing the performance of sales people in his next email, which I’m looking forward to.
Click thru and signup today and start learning direct marketing from a modern day master tomorrow.
Sales Persistence Pays Big Dividends
The next submission in my newly named The Simplenomics of Sales People is one of the two or three real secrets of my success. Without this trait, you’ll really struggle in your quest for excellence.
Persistence
It takes persistence to break down resistance. Simple, but true.
Some prospects have been purchasing from another supplier for a long time. Rarely will you break thru in one visit.
They don’t know you. They don’t trust you. They don’t need you.
Get over it and then get to work making yourself useful.
Repetition, with some variations to your message, will eventually allow you to become a fixture in their inner circle.
Persistence doesn’t equal aggravation, so don’t make a pest of yourself.
I’m not alone in touting persistence, so check these links for more info:
My thanks go out to Glenn Ross, Mr. Customer Service, for helping me find the name for this series.
Confidence Is Essential To Higher Sales
The next submission in my (potentially named) The Simplenomics Guide to Desirable Traits For Sales People or maybe Mike’s Simple Guide To Desirable Traits For Sales People is one of the traits that some old time sales masters believe you have to be born with:
Confidence
Before you attempt to sell your prospect a product or service, you must first sell him on you.
Unless you portray confidence in your company, it’s product or service, you have little hope in selling something to anyone. You may be lucky to be the one taking the order from someone else’s previous work, but don’t fool yourself into believing that you did all the right things at the right time.
As soon as you let your voice crack or your confidence waver, you start down the slippery slope that has a big ‘ol NO waiting at the bottom.
To further your sales education, here’s three articles that will help you build your sales confidence.
Build And Protect Your Sales Confidence by Shamus Brown
How To Unleash Unstoppable Sales Confidence by Gerry Robert
Exude Sales Confidence by Tom Hopkins
