Six Ways You Can Try Harder In Sales

1. Make One More Call: You have called your dream client dozens of times in the past. You haven’t been able to get any receptive contact on the line. You have made calls all day, and now you are a little burnt out. You could chalk today up as a loss and go home. Or you could tough it out and make one more call.

 

2. Turn the Lights On: Your quarter isn’t what you want it to be. Next quarter doesn’t look like you need it to look from here. Continuing to do what you have done up to this point isn’t a recipe for improved results. You could rationalize away your failure to produce the results you need, or you could try harder and get to work an hour early. You could get there early enough to turn the lights on and prepare yourself to achieve the outcomes that you need.

 

3. Last Car to Leave the Lot: You could have your bags packed and be ready to walk out the door at 4:45 PM, like many of your peers. Or you could try harder and stay an hour after work to do all your administrative working, saving your real working hours for sales-related work. When was the last time your car was the last car to leave the parking lot?

 

4. Make a Difference for Your Clients: Your struggling to help your new client get the results that they need. Your operations team is struggling, too. You could hope that your team eventually gets it right, or you could try harder. You could exercise your leadership and your change management skills and assemble a crack team of people who care enough to make a difference. You could try harder and work that team to develop the ideas and make the changes that make a difference for your client.

 

5. Building a Better You: You probably aren’t the best you that you are capable of being. None of us are. You could try harder to be a better you by spending time, energy, and money on developing the only real asset you will ever have for producing sales results: you! You could turn of the television and the Internet, and instead read a book on business or sales. You could take a class. You could make a study of sales and sales management.

 

6. Work Harder: Enough with the working smarter. You are smart enough to succeed. Trying harder in sales sometimes means you simply have to work harder. Blasphemy? I know. Activity isn’t a cure for all sales problems, but it is sure as Hell a cure for low activity.Trying harder sometimes boils down to doing a whole lot more of what you aren’t doing a whole lot of. There is no history of salespeople dropping dead of exhaustion after working themselves to death, and you won’t be the first.