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There are many of your peers who believe the ideas being spewed by the self-loathing, Henny Penny’s of “sales improvement” to be true. They take their words as gospel, particularly when it absolves the person of responsibility for the more difficult parts of selling like proactively prospecting, and growing their business acumen and their ability to offer advice.

Many of your peers are zagging, based on the debilitating, disempowered mindset of those who suggest that salespeople are doomed, irrelevant, and soon to be completely automated. While they zag, you should zig.

Zig

Many of your peers have given up cold calling, and with it, prospecting. They’ve settled into the warm comfortable role of order-taker. Some believe the great lie that the phone is no longer a useful tool, and that using it makes them a telemarketer. They believe that interrupting someone is a cardinal sin, one that causes them to be something less than consultative, or it will prevent them from being a trusted advisor.

Zig: Go against the grain here and prioritize prospecting, especially using the telephone to proactively call your dream clients.

Some have given up targeting and pursuing their dream clients altogether, trading the proactive creation of opportunities for the passive, reactive waiting game. There are many salespeople who are now completely dependent on SDRs, inbound marketing or, in the very worst of all cases, automating all attempts to engage a prospective client.

Zig: Trade a passive, reactive approach based on waiting for someone else to develop an opportunity for you for taking your results into your own hands and targeting and pursuing your clients.

Most dangerously, some have traded building their personal brand building by gaining a dominating information disparity by developing their business acumen for posting on social media.

There is good reason to be known, and to be known as a value creator. The social tools can cover half of that, the being known half. That approach does nothing about the “value creator” piece. If your dream client knew what they needed to know to produce the results they want, they’d already be producing those results.

Zig: While your peers believe and behave as if their prospective clients have information parity, knowing everything that they know, you zig and develop a dominating information disparity by putting in the work to develop an unassailable business acumen.

One final zig. While many of your peers zag towards disempowering and debilitating beliefs, you zag towards those that empower you. Zig would have.

Never let anyone feed you their fears.

Tags:
Sales 2017
Post by Anthony Iannarino on August 12, 2017

Written and edited by human brains and human hands.

Anthony Iannarino
Anthony Iannarino is a writer, an international speaker, and an entrepreneur. He is the author of four books on the modern sales approach, one book on sales leadership, and his latest book called The Negativity Fast releases on 10.31.23. Anthony posts daily content here at TheSalesBlog.com.
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