“You are the best person who can help yourself best.” This is one of the statements I keep repeating to myself since I was a teenage boy laden with difficult life situations until now that I am working on my life mission.
Whether you are struggling with an inner battle with yourself or experiencing difficulties caused by outside forces, the decision to allow such challenges to bring you down is with you. This mindset helped me in all aspects of life, most significantly in my career as a salesperson.
When I struggled to obtain the required sales results in the past, I helped myself move forward and be better by first deciding to do whatever it takes to improve my character and skills. I learned and kept learning throughout the years because I chose to and accepted the different lessons that can help me. Here are the most significant pieces of knowledge that I decided to follow and, in turn, helped me be better in my chosen career:
- Find your one thing and put your 100% energy into it. So many of us have tried saying yes to a lot of things and opportunities. We believe that if we have more things to do, the better. That is why we keep on adding tasks as we go along. We should learn to subtract something from our plates and focus on one thing at a time. Going small in what we do and putting our energy into it will help us achieve what we want. If we direct our energy and time to many things simultaneously, we only get minimal results. Learn to say no to be busy and say yes to be productive.
- Focus on your mission, not on the commission. It is sad to say that many salespeople enter the world of sales solely for the commission. Their actions make people feel that they intend to gain money and not fulfill their supposed purpose as company representatives. This type of salesperson usually can’t connect with the buyers because the heart is not in the right place. Inadvertently, buyers are left to feel that the transaction is favorable to the salesperson but not to them. As I always say, selling is a transfer of feelings or beliefs. Focus on your mission, and commission will follow naturally.
- Have strong self-discipline every single day. A lot of salespeople don’t achieve what they want. Not because they are not able, but because they don’t have self-discipline. For example, we should not only be working hard when the deadline is close or when somebody is watching us. Instead, we should be working regularly and productively to achieve our goals consistently – every single day. It does not mean that you cannot relax. It only means that you should use your time wisely, set a daily goal, and do whatever it takes to accomplish it. Remember, your self-discipline plays a significant role in your success.
- Build harmonious relationships with your valued clients. We should not only be friendly when we are still convincing them to buy or avail of our product or service then become cold when they finally do. Our clients buy because they trust that we will help them when they encounter difficulties with the product or service. Leaving clients to figure out things about the product or service on their own or waiting for them to contact us for whatever they need will make us unreliable, untrustworthy, and not an expert. Communicate with them regularly.
- Keep learning new things and improving yourself. Whatever information we know now may still be true but no longer applicable tomorrow. The skills that we use now may no longer be practical the next day. If you are still having a hard time selling your product or service using your old strategies, try to learn something new and make it work for you. We need to keep updating ourselves with further information and skills and engage ourselves in training to upscale our knowledge and skills. Learning and improving ourselves must never stop.
You may accept all these pieces of advice or not. The decision is yours. No matter how much knowledge and skills we learn from other people, it will be up to us to accept those or not at the end of the day. But, I got life-changing results when I applied the above learning in my life. I hope that it will help you, too. Will you allow me to help you through these recommendations?