Just Stop It

Just stop it.

Just stop believing that the new thing will solve the old problems. Prospecting has never been easy. Acquiring new opportunities is challenging even in the best of times. If by chance you happened to sell a product in hot demand and your clients beat a path to your door you were nothing more than lucky. Don’t expect that to ever be the norm. The only way to acquire new opportunities is to do the work.

To just stop pretending that you don’t have time to update your sales force automation software. If you were to enter all of the opportunities that you create in a single day it’s likely that that exercise might take all of 10 minutes. So you’ve fallen behind and have to catch up? Seriously, you don’t have enough opportunities for it to take you more than an hour. No one does. But, your relationships are the most important asset you will ever have as a salesperson (or as a person). The record of those relationships are important to maintain. Take the 15 or 20 minutes a day to keep those records up to date.

Just stop making excuses as to why your sales results aren’t what you want them to be. It’s a waste of time, and it doesn’t do anything to move you closer to your sales goals. It’s not your sales manager, even though he doesn’t care enough about you. It’s not your territory. It’s not your product, service, or solution. The sooner you accept that you’re the only one that can change your results the sooner you’ll produce them. Believe in yourself, and believe you have the power to make a difference.

Just stop complaining about your price. Everyone complains about their price. Selling would be easy if all you had to do was say yes to the price that your client’s demand. But then, that wouldn’t be selling, now would it? Unless you happen to work for a company that competes on price (something as likely as your riding into your next sales call on a unicorn), you are going to have to work very hard to create value and even harder to capture some of it. The only thing you can do to make selling easier is to create enough value that no one has a problem with you capturing some part of it.

Just stop it.

Questions

Why is it easy to believe that there is some new answer to age-old problems? How often do these new ideas work?

If you are being honest, how many opportunities do you create in a day? How long would it take you to keep meticulous records on those relationships?

Why is it so easy to blame someone else for our own poor results? How much faster do you improve those results when you take 100% responsibility for them?

How do you make it easy to sell value instead of price?