Becoming The Most Productive, Best, And Highest-paid Salesperson

Whenever you are a salesperson, you are selling your products or services, selling banks, unloading your money, selling suppliers on giving you credit and good prices, and selling people on the idea of working for you rather than for someone else.

The only question is, how good are you at selling? Have you ever wondered why some salespeople are more successful than others? Have you ever wondered why some salespeople make more money, live in nicer homes, drive newer cars and dine in better restaurants? Have you ever wondered why some people rise to the top of the sales profession in a few months or years and earn the respect and esteem of the important people around them? Have you ever wanted to achieve the same results as the top salespeople in your business? Welcome to the crowd. Everyone wants to be successful. Everyone wants to have a nice life with a great family, a good income, a nice car, and a wonderful future.

GET SERIOUS ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS OR CAREER

In this Module, you will discover how you can become one of the most productive, best selling, and highest-paid salespeople in your profession. You will learn the secrets of success practiced by the happiest and highest-paid sales professionals in every field. You will learn how to run circles around your competitors and become one of the most respected people in your industry. The good news is that you have the potential right now with your current talents and abilities to be far, far better at selling than you\’ve ever been before. Anything anyone else has done, you can do as well if you want it badly enough and if you\’re willing to work at it long enough. The turning point in your sales career and in your business career, for that matter, comes when you finally decide to get serious.

Many people drift along in selling for years, achieving average levels of performance, and enjoying average rewards. But then something happens to them. Sometimes they get excited, sometimes they get angry. Sometimes they see other people who are doing far better than they are. Who are certainly no more talented at that moment for whatever reason, they make a firm decision that their future is going to be different from their past?

They get serious.

The turning point toward greater sales in your business is when you finally make the decision to become one of the best in your field. You resolve to pay any price to make any effort to develop any quality or skill and to overcome any obstacle necessary to move to the top of the profession of selling. No one becomes excellent at selling by accident; it only happens by design. You first make a decision to excel, and then you create a plan. You chart out a course of action. You organize every day, every week, and every month into a part of a continuous process of professional growth and development.

“As Paul Bear Bryant, the famous University of Alabama football coach, once said, it\’s not the will to win that counts. Virtually everybody wants to be a winner; it’s the will to prepare to win that makes champions.”

BECOME EXCELLENT IN SELLING

To become excellent in selling. You must make a firm unequivocal decision to be the best at what you do. You must decide to join the top 10 percent of people in the volume of sales. You must set superb performance as your overarching goal, and you never give up until you achieve it. Remember, everyone who is in the top 10 percent of selling today was once in the bottom 10 percent. Everyone who is ahead in this profession was once behind. Everyone who was at the front of the line started at the back of the line.

“Abraham Lincoln once said the fact that some succeed greatly is evidence that others may succeed greatly as well.\”

The Law of Cause and Effect says that for every effect in your life, there is a specific cause.

If you can identify the effects, you want higher sales, higher income, greater profitability, more success, and more respect and esteem from others. You can trace them back and find out what other successful people who started at the bottom did to achieve those goals. When you do the same thing that other successful salespeople do over and over, you\’ll eventually get the same results.

THE LAW OF INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENT

The law of incremental improvement lies at the root of all great success in life. This law says that every great achievement is an accumulation of hundreds and even thousands of tiny efforts that no one ever sees or appreciates. But the accumulation of these efforts day after day, week after week, and month after month adds up to an extraordinary career and an extraordinary life.

“The poet Henry Wordsworth Longfellow once wrote those heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”

> RULE Here\’s a great rule for achieving personal excellence. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first, and often it\’s worth doing poorly several times until you master it.

When you learn a new method or technique and sell, resolve to try it out 5 or 10 times before you pass judgment on it. Invariably, the first time you try something new, you will do it poorly. One of the primary reasons for failure and underachievement is that when people do something poorly the first time out, and it doesn\’t work, they quit. They give up.

As a result, they don\’t improve and make little or no progress at all. But this is not for you. You have made a decision to become excellent at selling. You know that anything that anyone else has done, you can do as well. You know that there are no limits on what you can accomplish, except the limits you place on your mind. You also know that you can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. You know that anything that anyone else has learned and practiced, you can learn and practice as well until you master it. Commit today to reading every book that can help you in your field. Listen to audio programs in your car as you drive from place to place. Take all the training you can get from your company and other training offered by companies that specialize in training salespeople. Never stop learning and improving. Sales are the essence of business success. Your decision to become absolutely excellent at selling will have a greater effect on your business\’s revenues and profitability than perhaps any other decision you make. The fact is that you will be happy and successful in your business only when you absolutely know deep down inside that you can sell well in any market, and this is completely up to you.

When you start a business, you take complete charge of your financial destiny. You become unemployable to any other company. From that day onward, the biggest mistake you can make is to think that you work for anyone else but yourself. From the time you start your first business until the time you retire, you\’re self-employed. You are the president of your own company. You are the architect of your destiny and the master of your fate. This attitude of self-employment shows in the acceptance of a high level of personal responsibility for every area of your life. This is the core quality of high performance and personal effectiveness. The attitude of self-employment is the foundation of self-reliance and personal power. As the president of your own company, you are completely responsible for every aspect of your business. You are in complete charge of marketing and selling, production, distribution, quality control, and customer satisfaction. You are responsible for training and development for upgrading the skills and abilities of yourself and your staff. You are paid in direct proportion to your performance and your results. You are totally responsible for your output and your contribution. You determine your own income and design your own future every single day. Superior people in every field accept complete responsibility for their lives and their work. They refuse to make excuses or blame other people for their problems.

They believe that, as President Harry Truman once said, “the buck stops here.”

The best salespeople in every field seem to have feelings of high self-esteem, self-reliance, and self-responsibility. They see themselves as being completely in charge of their own lives. They never complain, never explain. If there\’s something in their lives that they don\’t like, they work to change it.

Top businesspeople know that they are where they are and what they are because of themselves. You are where you are today as a result of all your past choices and decisions. If there\’s any part of your life that you\’re not satisfied with, you\’re always free to make new and better choices and decisions. Resolved today to be a master of change rather than a victim of change. Decided to be a creator of circumstances rather than a creature of circumstances. Decide today to take complete charge of your life and your sales. Be proactive rather than reactive. Your attitude of self-responsibility of seeing you as completely in charge of sales and results in your business will do more to give you the feel of self-confidence and personal power and perhaps any other decision you can make. Say to yourself throughout the day, no matter what happens; I am responsible, I am responsible.

Committing to excellence in selling to becoming one of the very best salespeople in your field, combined with the attitude of self-responsibility, will make you unstoppable in your business. Becoming excellent at selling will guarantee your success, and nothing else can.

One of the greatest business principles discovered in the 20th century is the winning edge concept. This concept says that small differences in ability can translate into large differences in results. The best salespeople have developed small winning edges that translate into huge differences in sales results. This is why the top 20 percent of salespeople make 80 percent of the sales and, on average, earn 10 and 15 times as much as those in the bottom 80 percent. This 80/20 rule applies to selling in another way. Fully 80 percent of sales success is psychological. Only 20 percent is technical. Only 20 percent is contained in all the product knowledge and specific sales skills that you can learn. Your attitude and your personality will determine fully 80 percent of your sales and your income. The highest-paid salespeople have certain attitudes and qualities of thinking in common. When you begin to think like the top salespeople and develop the same attitudes as they have, you will soon be making more sales more easily than ever. You will soon be generating the same high levels of profitability as the top people.

Millions of dollars have been spent, and thousands of salespeople have been tested to uncover the qualities that would most predict high levels of success in selling. Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, who conducted these studies for 22 years, finally concluded that the highest-paid salespeople are far more optimistic than the average salesperson. The quality of optimism having a positive mental attitude is a more accurate predictor of success than any other single measure. Optimism means that you have a generally positive and constructive attitude toward your life and work towards yourself and toward others. A positive mental attitude has been defined as a positive response to stress. Anyone can be positive and optimistic when things are going well. It\’s only when you face the inevitable ups and downs of rejection and disappointment that you demonstrate what you\’re really made of.

“Epictetus, the Greek philosopher, said circumstances do not make the man. They merely reveal him to himself and to others, for that matter.”

There are three qualities that lead to a positive mental attitude. Each of these qualities is learnable. Each of these qualities is demonstrated by the highest-paid salespeople and most successful business people in every area. Each of these qualities can be acquired by practice and repetition.