DIG IN Everyday!

I was recently asked, as a veteran with 25+ years in sales, sales management, consulting and now sales coaching for the past 15 years, what I would tell my young, new-to-the-business-self about how to be successful in business. It wasn't an easy question to answer at first because there are too many lessons that have come over the past 2 decades to distill it down to just 2 or 3 helpful bits of wisdom. After some reflection, however there are 3 guideposts I feel have been core to the success I've been able to create through selling that have impacted every area of my business and everything that I've done along the way both professionally and personally.  

It boils down to this:

• strengthen your sense of self-efficacy and stay resilient.
• deploy your power to choose 
• execute proactive actions every single day...especially in selling 

And the shortest answer is: DIG IN? every day!

Self-efficacy: Self-efficacy refers to your belief in your capacity to execute the behaviors necessary to produce specific performance and success outcomes. Self-efficacy also reflects your level of confidence in your ability to exert a sense of control over your own motivation, behavior, and social environment.

To do this, in everything you do, you need to be able to trust yourself. To silence the voices that have a million opinions that keep you running in circles and chasing your tail both internally and externally. Trust the education you've already invested in, trust your intuition, trust your perspectives and know without a shadow of a doubt, whatever you face, good or bad, YOU WILL FIGURE IT OUT. Sometimes on your own and sometimes informed by the experiences of others but ultimately, the decision to take action should come from your own sense of direction and the goals only you can define by the terms you have decided are right for you.   

Choice: Freedoms will be robbed from you when you feel you don't have choices. Feeling like you're at the mercy of your circumstances without choice or option is the poison that will rob you of your dreams and it's the danger zone of "stuckedness" that keeps significant progress at bay. Quite bluntly, it's the place where businesses die. In all circumstances, you have the power of choice. 

Choosing the next step, choosing who might be able to help or advise you or even choosing to quit. You have to know you have choices and deploy them every single day and sometimes, every single hour. Forget about “right” choices, make informed choices to the best of your ability and then take massive action. Indecision has far greater risks than the decisions you make that might end in less than ideal way. (aka; failure) Just decide, commit, learn, wash, rinse and repeat!

Be Proactive: Too many business owners get stuck in doubt, fear and overwhelm for far too long and for many reasons, but the primary being the fear of failure and this idea that they don't have all of the answers is a killer. Many of my coaching clients have come to me in the midst of yet another information seeking and advice collecting mission. 

For some, it’s a vicious cycle. “If I can just learn more about ________from this program, that secret tip, this new guru” — this goes on for months, sometimes years and clients have stayed in this never ending circle because they never act on a single tactic or piece of information because of fear. Fear of getting it wrong. Fear of being different. Fear of being rejected. Fear of being found to be a fraud. It’s debilitating. At some point, you have to DECIDE and deploy the execution of a plan. Investigate and then IMPLEMENT. There is no other way. 

The next hurdle is eliminating what I call the "build it and they will come" mentality. Every business owner is, whether they like it or not, a sales person. Without sales, without the transaction of money for value, you don’t have a business, you have an expensive hobby. 

Being proactive also means driving revenue and driving sales and the highest priority should be placed on having as many conversations with ideal prospects as you possibly can every single day. Proactive sales activity is going to be your path to success and it will be what differentiates you from your competition. Business owners struggle to overcome the fear of reaching out to people they don't know. I break this down into easy, bite-sized pieces for my clients so it’s less scary but the one bit of perspective I can share that helps every one of them is to redefine what sales is for you.

Sales is serving and quite honestly, nothing more than a treasure hunt to find the problems you solve in the people who have the most urgency to solve them.  

I know what you’re saying… "I don't like selling.", "I don't want to come across pushy.", "I don't want to bother people." To all of these excuses, let me ask you just one question just as I ask my clients, "If you had the cure to cancer, would you stop at anything to get that cure into the hands of the people who were dying? Would you worry about being pushy? Would you worry about bothering people? Would you say, “I don’t like curing cancer.” The bottom line is it this — your solution IS a cure to cancer; it’s the cure to the kind of cancer that’s killing relationships, businesses, profitability, culture and society. 

In those moments when you're needing to reach out to share your solution and you're suddenly faced with that inevitable fear that makes you begin reciting more avoidance rhetoric like this: "But I don't know what to say", "but I don't know who to talk to." — deploy your sense of self-efficacy and trust you'll figure it out by doing it over and over and over again. You'll never become comfortable with it without doing it. Repetition is your secret weapon for developing your sales resilience. If you've never made a cold outreach before, talk to those who have and ask what's working for them (or ask me).

For your greatest success, you're either taking imperfect-proactive action daily or you're taking proactive steps in learn how to take imperfect action daily. The moral of the story is, just do something. Take action, use your power of choice and don't stay stuck for long. The world needs what you have to offer. You're on a life and business saving mission — now, go serve and and save lives and businesses.