You Are Being Trained to Sell Every Day, Or You Could Be

Most of us go to work each day and we do our jobs. We go about all the tasks and activities that we believe produce results, never stopping to reflect on what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how it might be done more effectively or more efficiently.

Every day brings opportunities to make the observations and to discover the changes that can improve your future performance—if you take the time and make the effort.

Be Conscious and Pay Attention

It isn’t enough to go about your day-to-day tasks and activities or to simply do your job. At least it’s not if you want to improve. Improvement requires that you stop the rote repetition of tasks and be more mindful about your work. Instead of going through the motions, you have to instead enter into every task and activity with a deliberate, conscious focus on what exactly you are doing.

You have to pay attention to your attention.

If you pay careful attention, you’ll notice that what you say doesn’t exactly send the message that you intended to send. You’ll notice that you have slipped from a high level, engaging conversation with your dream client to something that isn’t going to get either of you the outcomes that you need.

And you’ll also notice and capture what really works and when you are really effective. You’ll notice the great language choices that you make. You’ll notice how the activities that get your full attention are of a higher caliber than your normal work, and that it produces a greater impact on your dream clients.

Make and Record Observations

By being conscious and paying careful attention, you will make some useful observations.

You’ll notice that there may be ways that you can be more efficient or more effective. You’ll notice some tasks and activities don’t produce any real or measurable result at all. You’ll notice that you make sales calls without achieving your objectives and that produce nothing of value for you or your dream client. You’ll also notice when your sales call goes out the window as soon as you sit down across from your dream client.

You’ll observe all kinds of lessons about what your dream clients believe is important, what they value, and how they go about their business, all of which can be useful in winning your dream client.

More still, recording these observations can increase your effectiveness. What did you do? How did you do it? What did you say? How did your dream client respond? Writing down these observations can help you by building them into your repertoire.

Derive Lessons

It isn’t enough to pay attention and record your observations. Your personal development requires that you derive the lessons that you take from those observations.

What can you learn from what you just learned?

You did something. It produced an awful response. What is the lesson? Perhaps it is to stop taking that action, or maybe it means what you tried doesn’t work under those circumstances.

You tried something else. It worked even better than you expected. What is the lesson? How can you do more of what works–and less of what doesn’t?

Apply Those Lessons to the Future

This is sales training. When you pay attention, make observations, derive lessons from those observations, and apply them to your future behavior and actions, you are training yourself to sell more effectively. You don’t have to wait for a formal sales training class to learn.

Training prepares you for experience; it doesn’t replace experience. The lessons are there for you to learn every day, and they seem to sink in a lot faster when they are tied to your real experiences, and not simply and academic discussion in a classroom.

Make every day training day. Make every dream client’s office the classroom.

Questions

How much attention to do you pay to what you are doing when you sell, and how much of it is really just going through the motions?

How much more effective are when you give something your full attention?

What can you do make more and greater observations about what you are doing and the results that it produces–or doesn’t?

Do you have a method for recording your lessons? (I do!)

How do you apply what you learn to future opportunities and future dream client accounts?