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As Emerson wrote, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”
If you confront your fear, your fear will go away. The only real anecdote to fear and worry is purposeful action. If you get going and start moving forward, you will forget to be afraid.
8. Distraction or Mind Wandering
These are subtle time wasters, but they are far too common. They result in not paying attention in a sales presentation. You do not hear the prospect fully, or you do not read between the lines to understand what the prospect is really saying. Many sales people are guilty of this. They simply do not pay sufficient attention because they are pre-occupied with their own thoughts.
Unfortunately, the prospect picks this up very quickly and soon loses all interest in doing business with you.
The way that you overcome the tendency to mind wander is to discipline yourself to face the prospect directly, lean forward, and watch him intently while he speaks. Imagine that your eyes are sun lamps, and you want to give his face a tan. This approach will keep you focused more intensely on the prospect, and snap you out of the tendency towards distraction.
9. Fatigue and Overwork
These are real killers in every area of work, and especially in selling. It is estimated that more than 50% of sales people today are working in a state of
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result, they go through the day tired, lacking the ability to fully concentrate on their work.
My rule is this: if you are going to sell five days of the week, you must go to bed early five days per week. Selling is a very draining and demanding profession. It requires a tremendous amount of physical and emotional energy to be effective at sales. You cannot afford to stay up late at night watching television or socializing if you’re going to be sharp and alert the next day.
You can break the tendency to sleep too little and work too hard by disciplining yourself to go to bed by ten o’clock each night. Turn off the television and resolve to get lots of rest. This will translate into more and better sales, higher income, and generate the money you need to take all the vacations you want.
10. Lack of Ambition or Desire
There are many people who are just going through the motions at work. This is usually the result of having too few goals, or having no goals at all.
Sometimes, people lack ambition or desire because they are selling the wrong product. They are trying to sell something that they don’t like or believe in.
Sometimes lack of ambition or desire to succeed in sales is caused by not believing in your boss, or not believing in the company, or not getting along well with your co-workers.
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Whatever the reason, if you are not positive and enthusiastic about your product or service, this could be an indication that you should be doing something else. If you don’t like the people you are selling to, you are probably in the wrong business.
You cannot for very long force yourself to sell something that is wrong for you. It will simply make you tired and depressed, and you will never be successful at it.
Use Your Time Well
Here are some valuable ideas you can use to help increase your sales effectiveness by using your time to its best advantage.
1. Get to Bed Early
Early to bed early to rise is the key to sales success. Get up and get going by 6:00 am. Get lots of sleep. Sometimes the very best use of your time is to go to bed early and get a solid nine or ten, or even twelve hours of sleep so that you can bright eyed and cheerful the next morning. It is very hard to be full of energy, excitement and enthusiasm about your product or service when you’re tired from not getting enough sleep.
2. Start Your Day Right
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Read thirty to sixty minutes in sales or motivation to start your day. This is one of the most important habits you will ever develop. Many sales people have told me that this technique of getting up each morning and reading thirty to sixty minutes has changed the whole direction of their career.
If you spent thirty to sixty minutes reading a book on sales each morning, over the course of a week you will probably read one whole book. If you read one book per week for the next year, and you don’t even read on the weekends or holidays, you will read fifty books on sales over the next twelve months. If you keep this up over the next ten years, you will read five hundred books. In a world where the average salesperson never reads a book on sales in his or her life, do you think that if you read five hundred books over the next ten years that it would affect your income?
The fact is that you would probably become one of the best informed, best skilled and highest paid sales people in America simply by reading thirty to sixty minutes on sales each morning. Each day, you can go out and apply something that you learned that morning. You never stop learning and growing.
3. Start Work Early
Schedule your first appointment early. Get up, get out and get going. Try to set your first appointment for 8:00 am or even 7:30 am. Often prospects who do not have time to see you in the daytime can meet with you at odd hours.
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them for breakfast or meet them in their office at 7:30 am, they can often fit you in.
4. Focus on Prospecting
A tremendous way to increase your time and effectiveness is to spend 80%
of your time prospecting until you become so busy closing sales and servicing customers that you do not have time to prospect anymore.
Remember, sales success in direct proportion to your ability to initiate new contacts. Sales success comes from being eager to call to call on customers.
When I was a sales representative leasing new office space, I would take the elevator to the top floor of an office building, and then call on every office in the building as I worked my way down. Over the course of a month, I could make several hundred calls.
If you find yourself with time on your hands, sit down and make twenty or thirty phone calls. You will be amazed at the results you get, and how much better you will feel as a result.
5. Work All the Time You Work
Spend your entire day working. Make every minute count. Work all the time you work. Remember, the average salesperson is only working 20% of could catapult you into the upper ranks of sales success.
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Don’t waste time. Don’t sit around drinking coffee or reading the newspaper. If you must take coffee breaks, do it with prospects or while you are on the move.
The average salesperson who takes two twenty minute coffee breaks per day spends forty minutes per day unproductively. Forty minutes per day multiplied by five days per week equals two hundred minutes per week. 200
minutes per week multiplied times 50 weeks per year is equal to 10 thousand minutes, or the equivalent to 166 hours of productive time that the average persons spend sitting around drinking coffee and wasting time.
166 hours is equal to four forty-hour weeks, the equivalent of one month’s income. If you want to give yourself a raise, the fastest way to do it is to work through your coffee breaks.
Use Your Lunch Breaks Wisely
Don’t waste lunchtime either. Use your lunch hour to prepare for the afternoon appointments, or to exercise or to do something that improves your productivity and performance.
If you use your lunch-time wisely, and you take one hour per day for lunch, this will give you an additional five hours per week, or 250 hours per year.
250 hours per year is more than six forty-hour weeks, or more than one and one half months of additional income. Just by using your coffee breaks and lunch breaks for productive activities you will increase your sales and your income by 20% almost immediately.
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6. Listen and Learn
Listen to educational audio programs in your car. Turn your driving time into learning time. Turn your car into a university on wheels.
From the time you get into the car until the time you get out your audio player should be working. Remember, the average salesperson spends 500 to 1,000 hours per year behind the wheel of his car, and sometimes much more.