Day In & Day Out

Jack, our CEO and my uncle, always told me his secret to being a successful salesperson is that he was willing to make one more sales call then the next person. He picked up the phone or stopped at one more location over what his quota was, and over time it added up to being very successful. 

Holly is a Nissan saleswoman, and sold me my last vehicle. I found her through a friend, who referred me, as Holly no longer takes walk-ins at the store location. I was shocked to hear this as I have never heard of a car sales person not taking walk-ins, but after hearing that she sells up to 40 cars a month, it became apparent why she did not have to take walk-ins. 

She has been the salesperson of the month/year for a long time now. Being curious, I asked her how she was able to get to this point. Good customer service, ease of purchase and good quality were of course part of it, but she said, as Jack did, she would make one more call each day than everyone else. That one small effort repeated every day has led her to be one of the top Nissan salespeople in the country.

Thomas Edison, famous for many inventions. One in particular he was working on was the lightbulb, and it is told that it took him 10,000 attempts to get it right by making small tweaks day in and day out. When asked how he was able to accept so much failure every day, he is quoted as saying, “I have not failed. I have just found 9,999 ways that do not work.” How many of us would have given up after the first 100 failures, let alone 9,999 failures?

Each person mentioned created a mindset to repeat small efforts in order to create long term results. What happens in those repeated actions is you start to perfect your message, your craft or an invention. The mindset has to be like that of Edison, Holly and Jack. They stuck to the foundations of their crafts, repeating them every day, building upon them, and with the repeated actions, results followed.

In any field of choice this mindset of making sure to do the small things is important. From learning a new hobby as water skiing to learning a new language, you have to perform small efforts to achieve success in either. The same with our positions, if we don’t repeat the small efforts every day our quality will ultimately drop, and our product will lose market share. At CEL we have to repeat small efforts everyday by making sure drawings are correct, screws are torqued correctly, settings on machines programmed right and packaging secure helps create a product that our customers will depend upon for their success.

In our particular business, our individually repeated efforts day in and day out, not only create success for us, but create success for those we supply our products, as they use them to test products, secure infrastructure and create their own products. The small effort of Jack calling one more potential customer day in and day out, helped build CEL into one of the best sensor companies in the world. 

Get into the mindset that the day in and day out effort creates a basis for moving toward success.