You are your own brand and your face is the face of the brand. Make that face positive, brave, happy and smile. A Chinese proverb says it even better: “A man without a smiling face must not open a shop.”
Sales Reminders 123-131
- Create a lead sharing breakfast group: lawyer, marketing pro, architect, rep from another industry, etc.
- Remember: order takers are extinct
- If there is a reason to question the ethics of a decision, you already know the answer
- Learn something new today
- Pay it forward.
- Make volunteering a part of your week
- Be special or be forgotten
- Blame no one.
Final Thoughts – Vancouver 2010 - Olympic Level Selling
Despite the commercialism that has crept into amateur athletics over the years, to me, the Olympics still embody everything that is good about sports: dedication, team work, persistence, goal setting, sacrifice, hard work, winning with class, losing with class, etc.
And, I must confess, I still get a lump in my throat every time the National Anthem is played.
Did you ever stop and think about how many hours Evan Lysacek, Lindsay Vonn, or Shaun White have practiced in their lifetimes? Odds are they didn’t decide last summer that they wanted to win Olympic gold.
There is a fascinating book out that I would encourage everyone to add to their sales library: Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell (he also wrote Blink).
In Chapter Two he quotes neurologist Dr. Daniel Levitin: “ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world class expert – in anything.” “In study after study of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, chess players, composers, concert pianist, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.”
Gladwell goes on to give other examples: the Beatles, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and shares this observation from John Lennon: “the more we practiced, the better we got.”
So where does that leave us in our quest to master the art of selling? Are any of us approaching 10,000 hours yet?
Prospecting, listening, presenting, networking, asking the right questions, professional persistence — are we already as good as we can get? Or, can we raise the bar, try to bring more value to our clients and begin to live and work outside our comfort zones?
So as you go into tomorrow, remember the Rule of One: make one more call, learn one more thing, swim one more lap, hand write one more thank-you card, read one more page, practice your elevator speech one more time, add one more customer to your pipeline, find one more client’s PAIN, research one more prospect on the Internet, and eat one more carrot.
Have a great week and go sell something.
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