What If You Were To Go All Out For Six Months?

???????????Today is the first day for the second half of the year. What would happen to your career if you were to go all out? Ever stop to consider this? What if you were to do all the basics for 180 straight days? Do you know how radically different your career would be? Do you know how improved you would be personally and professionally? Why ponder? Why not start today having the career and being the person you envisioned when you said “yes” to sales?

?????????In all likelihood, from the first day you started selling, you had visions of grandeur. You expected the product or service to be so good that it could sell itself. Then you got on the phones and people actually said “no.” “How could they?” you asked yourself. But you soon realized anything worthwhile in this world doesn’t come easy. Success requires diligence, patience, and tenacity.

Now maybe you’re to the point of having some success and perhaps you have won some awards or contests. You’re getting kudos from various sources (deservedly so), but still wondering why you are not seeing the level of success you pictured that first day.

?????????The answer is simple. It’s because you’ve never really gone all out in this career. You are holding yourself back, aren’t you? You’re holding back your own potential to see if this selling thing is really all it’s cracked up to be. Could this really be a lifelong career with riches beyond your dreams?

Try to understand what going all out would mean. It would mean complete (and, yes, blind) trust – putting your faith in your trainers, mentors, managers and the years of collective wisdom the company has established. Trust that doing the numbers will bring you everything you ever dreamed was possible. Hit your prospecting goal every single day and don’t quit until you do. Make X fresh prospecting calls daily no matter what, even if you have three presentations that day.

Read for at least 30 minutes daily. Yes daily. What could be more important than the two bookends on the direct sales business (prospecting and self-improvement)?

“Well,” you say, “I didn’t get into this business to cold-call for the rest of my life.” Guess what? None of us did. Not even your manager, who seems half crazy about the need to prospect. But here is the secret. Once you make it over the hump of going all out for six months in a row, then selling gets easier – much easier – and you’ll never have to put in those same numbers for that consecutive period of time again. Ever.

It’s like boiling water. Have you ever noticed that you need the stove on high until it starts boiling, but once it starts you can keep it boiling with much less energy? What happens to that water if you never put the stove on high enough to get it boiling? That’s right, you’ll expend more energy than if you had gone all out from the get-go, and not reach the results for which you were looking.

Here’s how it works. Once you’ve gone all out and stop holding yourself back, good things start to happen. You get unexpected referrals. You automatically get better at appointment-setting, qualifying, and closing. You can’t afford the time to be satisfactory at this business. You develop some going-the-extra-mile stories to tell your trainees and reps if you become a sales manager. And if you don't other managers are telling new reps those stories about you. You take that critical jump from just believing the basics to knowing the basics because you’ve seen the prosperity that comes ones way from doing them consistently over time (six months – that’s all!)

What if you were retiring years from now and had spent your entire career doing all right, just getting by being a long-term loyal rep? But you’re a rep who never really lived up to your potential, a rep that never went all out in this business for six months. Never did hit your daily prospecting goal for 180 days on end; never really got into the unshakeable habit of reading a half hour per day; never really understood what it took to be a sales champion; worse yet, having to live with the guilt of understanding but never being dedicated enough to do anything about it. How sad that would be!

I recently heard a wonderful definition of success. Success is not your position, your attainments, your accomplishments, your material wealth or your level of anything. Success is minimizing the difference between what you are and what you are capable of becoming. Unlike natural resources, the only way human potential is used up is that it is not used to its fullest. Be the person who uses your potential to the fullest.

Another great quote I heard recently is “You see the success for which you are searching when you stop doing your best and start doing what it takes.”

Do what it takes.