April, 2007

The Next Level

Make your sales results match your sales ability with these simple tricks. 

By Bill Lee

Do your sales results fall short of your potential?

Most salespeople are capable of far more than their performance suggests. Maybe you’ve never thought about what you’re capable of selling or about the distance between the results you’re achieving and your capability. Most salespeople could vastly improve their income if they did give this concept some serious thought.

One reason Tiger Woods wins so many golf tournaments is because he has great skill at the game of golf, but perhaps a bigger reason is his mental attitude going into each tournament: He fully expects to win. Before the tournament even begins, he envisions himself standing in front of cheering fans holding the winner’s trophy.

Woods is passionate about winning. He takes his golf game extremely seriously. He has a full-time coach, and every day he hits hundreds of golf balls and puts himself through a rigorous workout with a personal trainer. How hard do you work on your game; that is, your profession?

To achieve your full potential at anything—sports, raising kids, good health or sales—it’s critical to expose yourself to people who are better at those activities than you are.

Consider this: In my first sales job out of college, I was a superstar. I was No. 1 on my sales team. I thought I was a “natural” who could sail through life without having to work at it.

After four years, I quit that job and joined a company with a team that was light years ahead of me. I had to work days, nights, and weekends just to keep up. I constantly looked for opportunities to travel with one of these pros so I could pick his brain. I read dozens of books. I decided to quit listening to the radio and instead began listening to sales and motivational tapes. My car became a classroom. It took me four years of hard work to catch up.

Today, I still benefit from those lessons. I still read sales books and listen to CDs to stay sharp.

Exposure to good resources reminds me of sales and marketing techniques that somehow slipped my mind. “Use it or lose it,” as they say.

Try these recommendations to double your income:

 1. Find a Star Pick out a salesperson in your company whose performance is substantially superior to yours and ask that person to be your mentor. Spend time with him. Quiz him. Become a sponge and soak up whatever it is that makes him so successful. Ask him what he thinks might be standing between you and doubling your sales.

Go to Amazon.com and purchase several sales books and CDs. After reading each book and listening to each CD, put pressure on yourself by writing down what you have learned, and describing what you will do differently as a result.

3. Set a Goal Tell your boss that you have set a personal goal to double your sales and that you need brutal honesty. Find out what your boss thinks might be standing between you and doubling your productivity. Begin converting those liabilities into assets. To double your income, you must outsell your competitors just as Tiger outscores his rivals. And to consistently win at anything takes a lot of hard work. Your raise becomes effective when you do.