In sales you are your business; period. Today, start as president and CEO of YOU Inc. Your attitude, your very core belief, has to be that you work for yourself because guess what? In sales, more than in any other vocation, you do. You have to approach each day as if the checkbook were on your desk and you alone had to make payroll on Friday.
 Let me ask you a question, if you did have to make payroll on Friday what would you do this morning? Read the headlines on CNN.com? Check your Facebook page? I hope not. So look yourself in the eye and know that you are responsible for your sales success. Not your company, not your sales manager, not your clients, not the economy, not your husband, your wife, your parents, your kids, your product or your territory. YOU are responsible for your selling success; period. You have to accept 100% responsibility for your outcomes in order to be successful at selling. It is THE number one attitude shared by the best salespeople in the world.
So how do you begin, day one, at YOU inc.? The first step is already beaten to death above. It is attitude. You transform yourself in to YOU Inc.
Next you write a business plan. Planning sometimes sounds intimidating as you envision charts and projections and frowning bankers poring over some esoteric document objecting to it all while you and your accountant, sweat and try to come up with answers. For our purposes I will simplify business planning, reducing it to nothing more than thinking and making lists. This planning methodology has served me well for over twenty years.
Step one:
Sit with a blank piece of paper or a new Word file and begin to write down all of the activities that could be done to vault you toward selling success. You may want to title your page “Anything and everything I could possibly imagine to insure my selling success this year” or something like that.
Do not think about what any of the activities costs or how much time they may take or any other limiting beliefs. Just pour it all on to a piece of paper. You may want to visit every client you have ever sold or email and telephone a vertical list of thousands.
You may want to be at three trade shows a month or join a golf club or networking group. Just let the thoughts flow without regard to the practicality of it all. When you have finished comb through the document and pull out those things you can do within the next thirty days and write them down on a separate sheet. This is the beginning of your monthly plan. These may not be selling activities themselves but, rather, some prep work to go along with selling activities. For example, if you chose to email and call a vertical list of thousands you may put these activities into your monthly plan:
1. Research good list companies
2. Investigate Constant Contact software
3. Jot down ideas for the body of the email
4. Look in to placing an ad for a telemarketer
There may be more steps needed to launch a successful email/calling campaign but this is the essence of how you begin.
Your monthly plan will also include other ideas from you yearly plan. It may be that you want to visit all of your clients so, this month; you plan to visit the first twenty. I think you get the idea.
Once you have taken a good number of activities from your yearly plan and written them in to your monthly plan take a moment to bless the plan. That is, read it over and ask yourself this question. “If this was all I accomplished for the next thirty days would I see myself as successful?”
If the answer is yes, you have yourself a thirty-day plan and we are almost finished with business planning 101. The final step is to sit down on Sunday night, (Yes on Sunday night, remember YOU own the company) and pull out your thirty-day plan. Go through it and decide how much of it you can do this coming week. Write those things down on your weekly plan and put the monthly plan away for another week. Put that weekly plan in a prominent place and when you start work on Monday morning you will absolutely know what you need to do instead of wandering from email to voice mail to meetings to lunch and back again like all the people who are about to finish behind you on the sales charts.
| Frank Somma - |
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Frank Somma is a motivational speaker, workshop leader, coach, and author. Frank’s effectiveness is illustrated by the distinguished and varied companies, community organizations, groups, and schools that continue to rely on Frank’s message to motive their group and communicate their message. Frank brings his substantial experience in both the business and non-profit world, as well as his real life experience, to his work. The result is an exciting message that engages and enriches his audience – bringing groups together while at the same time, inspiring individuals to personal growth. FrankSomma.com Read More >> |
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