Your Sales Results Are the Result of Your Choices

Your sales results are the consequence of the choices you make. There are three fundamental choices that determine your results, and it is important to spend time examining all three. The three choices you make are your choice of beliefs, your choice of focus, and your choice of actions.

Your Choice of Belief

What you believe is the foundation of all of your results in life, including your sales results. Your beliefs are your blueprints. But we spend far too little time reflecting on what we believe, why we believe it, and whether or not the beliefs serve us.

If you believe that you can succeed against great odds, that belief will allow you to take actions that produce some result. If you believe that you can’t compete against larger competitors and win, if its your blueprint that bigger firms beat smaller firms, that belief will also provide you with some result. These two beliefs produce different results.

Maybe you believe that your clients all buy on price and that you have to behave like a commodity to win. Or you might believe that your clients need you to be a value-creating partner that can help them to propel their businesses new height. Can you see how these two opposing beliefs will prove to produce very different results?

You get to choose your beliefs. You can shed old beliefs and replace them with new, healthier beliefs.

Your beliefs underlie your focus.

Your Choice of Focus

Your results are in large part the result of your focus. If you focus your attention on negative ideas and events, your results will suffer. Likewise, if you focus your attention on positives, your will produce greater results.

I know a salesperson that is distraught that his company’s sales rules allow another salesperson to poach accounts in his territory if they are not acted on in a certain period of time. He focuses only on the fact that others can poach his prospects, some of whom he has spent time developing. Another salesperson in that same organization focuses on the fact that if any of his peers get lazy, he can poach their accounts, and he does so.

If you focus on prospecting, you build a bigger pipeline. If you focus on building consensus within your dream client’s company, you become a change agent. If you focus on winning large clients, you win some large clients.

You get to choose on what you allow your mind (the most complex and powerful thinking machine in the known universe) to focus. Your beliefs underlie your focus, and combined, your beliefs and your focus drive your actions.

Your Choice of Action

And this is where the rubber meets the road: action. The actions you take and the actions you choose not to take also determine your sales results.

Did you choose to make the call to your big deal dream client even though there was no existing opportunity, or did you decide not to act. Did you take the actions that nurtured the relationships that you need to create and win an opportunity? Or did you spend the day with the weapons of mass distraction, surfing the Internet for sports scores and gossip?

Your sales results are made up of the actions that you take, and the actions you fail to take. Taking the right actions leads to greater sales results. Taking the wrong actions leads to poor sales results, missed quotas, and potentially, a career change.

You control the actions that you take. Those actions produce results.