To be effective in sales requires many and varied skill sets and attributes, all of which are essential. But only one of these attributes is the foundation for all of the others, making it the master key to sales effectiveness. It is the cornerstone on which all other attributes and skills are built. With this attribute your success in sales is all but guaranteed, and without it you are certain to fail.

The essential attribute is self discipline.

Self Discipline

Self discipline is the ability to keep the commitments one makes to one’s self. This includes the promises we make to ourselves about our own behaviors and our own thoughts. Self discipline, sometimes described as willpower, isn’t about denial as much as it is about making choices about the future.

Self discipline is found in decisions about what actions you take today, whether you want to or not, to get a future result.

It is also the key to personal development. Almost anything you would like to improve about yourself starts with self discipline. Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to learn a foreign language? Do you want to improve your sales results?

Whatever you would like to improve starts with the self discipline of committing to taking some action or actions over a long period of time and then taking those actions. Self discipline is the key to personal development; personal development is the key to greater effectiveness in everything else.

What stops us from taking those actions?

The Devil Inside

What stops most people from developing to their full potential is the devil inside them. This devil is our own inherent and well-developed ability to rationalize our own behavior. It is easy to rationalize our decision to put off what we should be doing today until tomorrow. We say things to ourselves like: “There is still plenty of time,” and “I’ll start tomorrow.”

But there is never any more time than we have right now, and tomorrow never comes. What comes instead is the voice of our own devil, reminding us that there were no ill effects from postponing our commitments to ourselves yesterday, and today will be no different; says he: “We’ll start tomorrow. Relax.” But the ill effects are coming in the form of missed commitments, missed opportunities, and far poorer results than we would have had otherwise generated; it is inevitable.

Self Discipline and Sales

Sales is a activity-based endeavor. To succeed in sales you must be able to get yourself to take action. And, you must be able to keep yourself from being lulled into the false comfort that the important activities you need to take today can be put off until sometime in the future. These important activities are almost always the activities that are a low priority, but that have the highest impact over time. For salespeople, these activities include things like making cold calls, prospecting for new clients, qualifying these prospects, and following up with their prospects and clients.

Self discipline for salespeople also means controlling one’s thoughts, including a positive and optimistic outlook. The sense of optimism allows salespeople to succeed, paraphrasing Churchill, by going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm.

Self discipline means taking positive actions, but it also means avoiding negative thoughts and actions. This includes not allowing yourself to be distracted by the Internet, email, the water cooler or the millions of other mildly provocative or novel distractions that the world provides each day.

Do you want new customers and clients in the future? Cold call and prospect today. Do you want that dream prospect? Start developing the relationship today. Do you want a growing list of referrals? Start creating the kind of value for other people that they will be confident in recommending to others. Do you want to improve your sales by improving your business acumen? Start reading today.

Conclusion

Self discipline is truly the foundational attribute of great performers, including great salespeople. It is this discipline that allows them to take the actions that some put off and most never take. It separates the top performers from the rest of the pack. More often than not, it allows those with less skills and more desire to outperform those with greater skill and less discipline.

Questions

1. What promises have you consistently made to yourself and consistently broken in the past? How did you rationalize away your failure to keep that commitment? Did that rationalization turn out to be false?

2. What commitments to yourself do you need to make now? How will rationalize not keeping those commitments now that you know that the rationalization is false?

3. How would taking the daily action you need to take today improve your future sales results?

4. What distracts you? What do you have to do to rid yourself of these distractions?

5. How would you be different if you had an iron self discipline?

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4279.

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