You're in a Sales Role so Make a Choice

The summer vacations will soon be over and it’s time to get down to getting what you want from your sales role.

When you return to work from your summer break you can either: Meander along the pathway of time to the mid winter holidays.

Or you can get motivated with a few simple steps and get something really worthwhile from the next few months.

It’s your choice.

You are going to be at work anyway, so my way of looking at it is:

I’ve just returned from a vacation in the sun and I’m going to get something I want from the time between now and the winter holidays. Here’s the quick steps I follow

1. Picture something you want, something that if you get your hands o it you will feel really good. Ask yourself what would be goal worth achieving in the next 5 months. Take your time make it something worthwhile and motivating.

2. Now turn what you want into a personal goal linked to your sales role. You might want to start by picturing the cost of the thing you want. Once you can put a figure on what it will cost you can set the steps to achieving it. Look at how much extra will you have to earn each month and think about what that will mean in terms of additional sales.

3. Step 3 is where you come up with the actions that will generate the additional sales that you thought about in step 2. What will you do more of and what will you do different. Here’s some quick help to working out where you might target your actions Sales Plan for Success.

What to do next

So you’ve got a goal, you’ve turned it into a measurable financial amount, and you know which actions are going to get you to that goal in just a few months.

So what’s next.

What can you do and say to yourself to keep the feeling going and see progress being made.

Get a physical representation of your goal

What about a picture that you can see throughout your day, perhaps on your office wall, in your car, or even on your computer desktop or wallpaper. Is there an object that represents your goal, something you can grab hold of and anchor it the feelings you will get when you achieve your goal.

Measure your progress

When you can see your results and say how far you have moved in the direction of your goal you will find it easier to feel motivated to take more actions. You can use a spreadsheet, a wall chart, even some building blocks, but make sure you measure your progress.

A really important tip that I constantly repeat to my sales teams: Look how far you have come, not how far you still have left to go.

Be flexible

There are 3 things I look for in a sales person and one of them is flexibility. Flexibility to make changes when required and to take different actions if what they are doing is not working.

When you measure your progress and you haven’t gone as far forward as you should have it’s time to grab hold of your physical representation of your goal or look at your picture of what you want , and get some new ideas on actions you can take.

But remember, don’t knock yourself down, look at how far you have come, not how far you still have left to go. Did I already say I repeat that a lot?

Reward your success

When you see at the end of a month that you are on track you should reward yourself. Give yourself a small treat and condition yourself to the fact that success, even small ones, is linked to rewards.

You might think this is counterproductive because you are spending money on a reward that could go towards your overall goal. Trust me, it is money well invested because it builds successful behaviour patterns. Do you think all these big successful companies would spend big budgets on incentives if they didn’t work?

Support your ambition to hit your goal

If you were the CEO of an important business would you support your sales staff with training. You would give them the product knowledge and selling skills to hit their sales targets.

Well you are important, your goals are important, and you are in charge. So look around for opportunities to invest in training that supports you. Here’s a good place to start Sales Training.

I'm Stephen Craine from the website Sales-Training-Sales-Tips.com

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