The Endgame to Selling

In golf, there is a saying that, "You drive for show, but you putt for dough." In selling, you prospect and present for show, but you overcome customer skepticism and gain commitment for dough. Your ability to answer objections and get the sale is the true test of how good you really are as a salesperson.

The True Test of Selling

This is perhaps the most stressful and challenging part of the sales process. It's where the rubber meets the road. It is your ability to answer the questions that the prospect puts to you and overcome his natural reluctance to make a commitment that wraps up the sales process. It is also the part of the sales process that salespeople dislike the most and which customers find the most stressful.

Plan It in Advance

The end game of selling must be carefully thought through and planned in advance so that you are thoroughly prepared to bring the sales conversation to its natural conclusion at the earliest and most appropriate moment. Fortunately, this is a skill, like riding a bicycle or typing with a typewriter, and you can learn it through study and practice.

Handling Objections Comes First

Handling objections and closing the sale are two different parts of the sales process but they are so close together that this chapter will discuss them as a single function. Just as there are reasons why people buy a product, there are reasons why they don't. Often answering an objection or removing an obstacle is the critical element in making the sale. You can answer the objection and close the sale simultaneously.

Make It a Reason to Buy

Objections can be turned into reasons for buying. Just as there is a primary reason for buying a product, a hot button, there is a primary objection that stops the person from buying it. If you can emphasize the one and remove the other, the sale falls together naturally.

Smaller Products Versus Larger Products

In selling smaller products or services, where you can prospect and make a complete presentation in the first meeting, your approach to closing will be different from that required if you are selling a larger product in a multi-call sale that stretches over several weeks or months.

Ask For the Order

In the shorter, smaller sale, the prospect knows everything necessary to make a buying decision at the end of your presentation. Your aim should be to answer any lingering questions and then ask for the order. In the larger sale, you may have to meet with the prospect several times before the prospect is in a position to make a buying decision. You will have to be more patient and persistent.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, prepare yourself in advance for the endgame of selling by anticipating anything the customer might offer as a reason for not buying. Be ready.
Second, look for the hot button, the reason the customer will buy, and press it. Meanwhile, find out his major reason for not buying and remove it.

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Select Your Company Carefully

Only the truly competent individual can be free of politics in an organization. When you're really good at what you do, you can rise above politics. It's the mediocrities at work who have to play games and every study shows that although they sometimes succeed in the short-term, they invariably fail when everyone figures them out.

Do What You Have To Do

Select your work carefully and if you don't love what you're doing enough to want to be the best at it, get out! Flee from the boring or unsatisfying job as you would from a burning building. Working at something you don't care about is the very best way to waste your life. Remember, this life is not a rehearsal for something else.

Look for Pay for Performance

One key to getting onto the fast-track is for you to work for the right company and the right boss. The right company is one that respects its people and practices pay for performance. The right company is dynamic, growing, open to new ideas, and full of opportunities for people with ambition and initiative.

How to Make Progress

A woman spoke to me at a seminar in Pearl Continental Hotel and reminded me that she had asked me a question about two years ago. She had told me that she was very ambitious and hard-working but that she wasn't making any progress in the large company where she worked. She felt it was because most of the senior executives were men in their fifties and sixties and that women had a hard time getting into positions of responsibility. What could she do?

Change Jobs When Necessary

I told her quite frankly that there was nothing she could do. The senior executives and the company were not going to change. If she was really as capable as she said, I told her to find a job with a young, growing company that wouldn't care whether she was a woman as long as she could do the job.

A Success Story

She told me that she had followed my advice, quit her job, much to the disapproval of her co-workers, and found a job with a small growing company. MashAllah she had been promoted twice in the last 14 months and was already earning 40% more than her best year with her previous company.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do to assure that you are in the right position.
First, make sure that you really enjoy your work and that you do it well. You will never be successful at a job that you don't like.

Second, be sure that there are lots of opportunities for you to grow, develop and advance in your company. Your future is too valuable to waste where there is no future.

Parkinson's Law

Why People Succeed or Fail

Parkinson's Law is one of the best known and the most important laws of money and wealth accumulation. It was developed by English writer C. Northcote Parkinson many years ago and it explains why most people retire poor.

The Way the Law Works

This law says that, no matter how much money people earn, they tend to spend the entire amount and a little bit more besides. Their expenses rise in lockstep with their earnings. Many people are earning today several times what they were earning at their first jobs. But somehow, they seem to need every single penny to maintain their current lifestyles. No matter how much they make, there never seems to be enough.

The Key to Financial Success

The first corollary of Parkinson's Law says: "Financial independence comes from violating Parkinson's Law."

Parkinson's Law explains the trap that most people fall into. This is the reason for debt, money worries and financial frustration. It is only when you develop sufficient willpower to resist the powerful urge to spend everything you make that you begin to accumulate money and move ahead of the crowd.

Slow Down Your Spending

The second corollary of Parkinson's Law is: "If you allow your expenses to increase at a slower rate than your earnings, and you save or invest the difference, you will become financially independent in your working lifetime."
This is the key. I call it the "wedge." If you can drive a wedge between your increasing earnings and the increasing costs of your lifestyle, and then save and invest the difference, you can continue to improve your lifestyle as you make more money. By consciously violating Parkinson's Law, you will eventually become financially independent.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do to apply this law immediately:

First, imagine that your financial life is like a failing company that you have taken over. Institute an immediate financial freeze. Halt all non-essential expenses. Draw up a budget of your fixed, unavoidable costs per month and resolve to limit your expenditures temporarily to these amounts.

Carefully examine every expense. Question it as though you were analyzing someone else's expenses. Look for ways to economize or cut back. Aim for a minimum of a 10 percent reduction in your living costs over the next three months.

Second, resolve to save and invest 50 percent of any increase you receive in your earnings from any source. Learn to live on the rest. This still leaves you the other 50 percent to do with as you desire. Do this for the rest of your career.

Seven Simple Steps to Small Business Success

Many businesspeople achieve their greatest successes in unexpected areas. They begin a business and then they find that it isn't as profitable as they had anticipated, so they change direction, using their experience and their momentum, and strike paydirt in something else. The most important thing is to begin. To take action. To move forward one step at a time, learning and growing as you go. There is enough information available in virtually every field for you to become knowledgeable enough to achieve success. But action is necessary.

The Two Parts of Success

Success author Orison Swett Marden once wrote, the first part of success is get-to-it-ivness. The second part is stick-to-it-iveness. Every business beginning requires an act of faith and courage, a bold leap into the unknown. Only one in ten people who want to start their own businesses ever develop enough courage to begin and enough persistence to continue. Get-to-it-iveness. And stick-to-it-iveness. The fear of failure, more than anything else, holds people back. It paralyzes action. And it makes failure inevitable.

Begin With a Dream

Fortunately, even if you know nothing about business, you can begin with a dream, a castle in the air, and then build a foundation under it.

Seven Simple Steps

The starting point of many great fortunes has been these seven simple steps. Number one, set a goal and back it with a burning desire. Number two, begin accumulating capital with a regular savings program. Nothing else is possible without this. You cannot move forward until you start a savings program.

Use Your Current Job As A Springboard

Number three, use your current job as a springboard to later success. Learn while you earn. Take the long view. Number four, experiment in business on a limited scale so you can learn the key abilities necessary for success. Number five, search for problems, needs unmet, products or services you can supply of good quality at reasonable prices.

Read Everything You Can Find

Number six, read everything you can find on your chosen field. Remain flexible. Be willing to change your mind if you get different information. And number seven, implement your plans with courage and persistence. Have complete faith in your ability to succeed and never, never give up.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two actions you can take immediately to start moving toward entrepreneurial success:

First, set a goal, make a plan and then launch your plan. Get started. Do something. Begin on a small scale with limited risk and investment but get going!

Second, resolve that, no matter what happens, you will never, never give up until you are successful. Before you accomplish anything worthwhile, you will have to pass the persistence test. And the test will come far sooner than you imagine.

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Slice and Dice the Task

Why You Procrastinate

A major reason for procrastinating on big, important tasks is that they appear so large and formidable when you first approach them. One technique that you can use to cut a big task down to size is the "Salami slice" method of getting work done. With this method, you lay out the task in detail and then resolve to do just one slice of the job for the time being, like eating a roll of salami, one slice at a time. Or like eating one piece of a frog at a time.

Do One Small Part to Start

Psychologically, you will find it easier to do a single, small piece of a large project than to start on the whole job. Often, once you have started and completed a single part of the job, you will feel like doing just one more "slice." Soon, you will find yourself working through the job one part at a time, and before you know it, the job will be completed.

Just Get Started

Once you start working, you develop a sense of forward momentum and a feeling of accomplishment. You become energized and excited. You feel yourself internally motivated and propelled to keep going until the task is complete.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two actions you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, select one big important task and lay it out in front of you.
Second, select one part of the task and do it immediately.

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Six Steps to Effective Delegation

To delegate effectively in your work with others, there are six steps that you can take. If you neglect any one of these steps, you run the risk of miscommunication, misunderstanding, demoralization, and poor performance.

Step 1: Match the Person to the Job

One of the great time wasters in the world of work is delegating the task to the wrong person. Often the task is delegated to a person who is not capable of doing it properly or getting it done on schedule.

Step 2: Agree on what is to be done

Once you have selected the right person for the job, take the time to discuss the job with the person and agree upon what must be done. The more time you talk to discuss and agree upon the end result or objective-the more effort you make to achieve absolute clarity-the faster the job will be done once the person starts on it.

Step 3: Explain how the Job Should Be Done

Explain to the person your preferred approach or method of working. Explain how you would like to see the job done, and how you or someone else has done it successfully in the past.

Step 4: Have Your Employee Repeat Back Instructions

Ask the person to feed your instructions back to you in her own words. Have him or her explain to you what you have just explained and agreed upon. This is the only way that you can be sure that the other person actually understands the job or assignment he or she has been delegated to accomplish.

Step 5: Set a Deadline

Set a deadline and schedule for completion of the task. At the same time, arrange for regular reporting and periodic inspection. Invite feedback and questions if there are any delays or problems.

Step 6: Manage by Exception

Managing by exception is a powerful time management tool that you use to work more efficiently with other people. If the job is on track and on schedule, managing by exception means that the person does not have to report back to you. If you don't hear from him, you can assume that everything is going well. The individual only has to report back to you when an exception occurs and there is a problem with getting the job done on time, to the agreed upon level of quality.

Action Exercise

Sit down with your staff members and explain to them exactly why they are on the payroll and what their highest value tasks are.

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The Key to Sales Success

Learn to Listen Well

A vital key to sales success is listening. The ability to listen well is absolutely indispensable for success in all human relationships. The ability to be a good listener in a sales conversation is the foundation of the new model of selling. It leads to easier sales, higher earnings and greater enjoyment from the sales profession.

Being A Good Talker is Not Enough

Many salespeople have been brought up with the idea that, in order to be good at your profession, you must be a glad-hander and a good talker. You have even heard people say, "You have the 'gift of the gab'; you should be in sales!"

Focus On the Other Person

Nothing could be further from the truth. As many as seventy five percent of all top salespeople are defined as introverts on psychological tests. They are very easy going and other-centered. They would much rather listen than talk. They are very interested in the thoughts and feelings of other people and they are quite comfortable sitting and listening to their prospects. They would much rather listen than talk in a sales situation. Poor salespeople dominate the talking, but top salespeople dominate the listening.

Practice "White Magic" With Everyone

Listening has even been called "white magic." It is too rarely engaged in by business people. When a salesperson develops a reputation for being an excellent listener, prospects and customers feel comfortable and secure in his or her presence. They buy more readily, and more often.

Practice the 70/30 Rule

You've heard it said that Allah gave man two ears and one mouth, and he is supposed to use them in that proportion.

Top salespeople practice the "70/30 rule." They talk and ask questions 30 percent or less of the time while they listen intently to their customers 70 percent or more of the time. They use their ears and mouth in the right ratio.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, resolve today that, from now on, you are going to dominate the listening in every sales conversation. Become comfortable with silence.

Second, practice the 70/30 rule in every sales conversation. Listen 70% of the time and only talk and ask questions 30% of the time.

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Four Ways to Test Your Idea

How to be sure that you have a great business idea before you put time and money into it.

There are four great ways for you to test any product or service idea before you start a business built upon it.

The Best Source of Advice

Number one, seek out people who are already in the same business and ask their opinions of the product or service. Many people have saved themselves an enormous amount of time and money by finding that people who are already in the business wish they weren't in the business and who wish they hadn't invested the time or money to get in the business in the first place. So go and talk to them. Ask them what they think about the business. Ask them if they would recommend that someone else get into the business. Don't be shy or secretive.

Ask for Feedback On Your Idea

Every so often I have people come up to me and ask me if I would give them some advice on their business, and I say, "Well, what is your idea?" And they won't tell me what their idea is because they're afraid somebody will steal their idea. The fact is that ideas are a dime a dozen. So be perfectly open. Tell people what you're thinking of doing. And get feedback from people who are already in the business. That alone has saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars. It may even have saved my financial life on a couple of occasions.

Ask Your Bank Manager for Advice

Number two is to ask your bank manager for his opinion or advice. A bank manager, who deals with commercial accounts, very often has a tremendously accurate sense for what kind of businesses will succeed and what kind won't. One 5-minute interview with my bank manager a few years ago saved me Rs. 200,000 in an investment. He pointed out to me the weaknesses in the particular business I was looking at getting into, and I had no answer for him. So I didn't go into the business and the people who did lost everything that they put into it. Ask your bank manager. Your bank manager can be one of the very best sources of business advice.

Check With Family and Friends

Number three, ask your friends, ask your family, ask your acquaintances for information. Family members are very good targets for market research. Ask your family and friends if they would buy the product or service that you're thinking of offering. How much would they pay for it? Listen to their questions. Listen to their criticisms. Listen to their concerns. Because if you can't answer their questions and concerns in a logical and believable way, it could be that there's something wrong with your idea.

Talk to a Potential Customer

The fourth way to do market research is to visit prospective customers for the product or service and ask if they would buy it. If you're thinking of selling something to a company, go to the type of company that you would sell it to and ask if they would buy it if you produced it. If you're thinking of selling something through retail, go to the retailer and ask them if they would buy it or sell it. Ask the customer. Customers are very open and very candid and sometimes they'll give you insights that will be worth their weight in gold. If you're going to sell through a retailer, ask the retailer if he or she could sell the product if they were carrying it. Why or why not?

Action Exercises

Now, here are two things you can do immediately to test your ideas more thoroughly before you invest in them:

First, visit people who are in the same business and ask for their opinions. Call them on the telephone. A person already doing the business is the best source of advice in that business.

Second, ask your bank manager for advice. Lay out your business plan or idea to him or her and ask for his or her candid feedback. This could save you an enormous amount of time and money.

Increasing Your Value

Your goal is to organize your life in such a way that you enjoy a good income, a high standard of living, and that you are the master of your economic destiny rather than a victim of changing economic times.

Contribution is the Key

Your job is an opportunity to contribute a value to your company in excess of your cost. In its simplest terms, your job is as secure as your ability to render value in excess of what it costs to keep you on the payroll. If you want to earn more money at your current job, you have to increase your value, your contribution to the enterprise.

Add Value Every Day

If you want to get a new job, you have to find a way to contribute value to that enterprise. If you want any kind of job security, you must continually work at maintaining and increasing your value in the competitive marketplace.
And here's a key point. Your education, knowledge, skills and experience all are investments in your ability to contribute a value for which you can be paid. But they are like any other investments. They are highly speculative.

Knowledge and Education Are Sunk Costs

Once you have learned a subject or developed a skill, it is a sunk cost. It is time and money spent that you cannot get back. No employer in the marketplace has any obligation to pay you for it, unless he can use your skill to produce a product or service that people are ready to buy, today.

Prepare For Your Next Job

Whatever job you are doing, you should be preparing for your next job. And the key question is always: Where are the customers? Which businesses and industries are growing in this economy, and which ones are declining?

Where is the Future?

I continually meet people who ask me how they can increase their income when their entire industry is shrinking. I tell them that there are jobs with futures and there are jobs without futures, and they need to get into a field that is expanding, not contracting.

Never Be Without A Job

There are three forms of unemployment: voluntary, involuntary, and frictional. Voluntary employment exists when a person decides not to work for a certain period of time, or not to accept a particular type of job, hoping that something better will come along. Involuntary unemployment exists when a person is willing and able to work but cannot find a job anywhere. Frictional unemployment is the natural level; this includes the working population who are between jobs at any given time.

Three Keys to Lifelong Employment

However, there are always jobs for the creative minority. You never have to be unemployed if you will do one of three things: change the work that you are offering to do, change the place where you are offering to work, or change the amount that you are asking for your services. You should consider one or more of these three strategies whenever you are dissatisfied with your current work situation.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, look around you at your current job and find ways to create added value every day. There's always something more you can do.
Second, identify the kind of work you want to be doing in the future and then make a plan to develop the knowledge and skills you will require to do it well.

The Law of Capital

The Law of Capital - your most valuable asset, in terms of cash flow, is your physical and mental capital, your earning ability.

Your Earning Ability

You may not even be aware that, unless you are wealthy already, your ability to work is the most valuable asset that you have. By utilizing your earning ability to its fullest, you can bring thousands of dollars each year into your life. By applying your earning ability to the production of valuable goods and services, you can generate sufficient money to pay for all the things that you want in life. The amount of money that you are paid today is a direct measure of the extent to which you have developed your earning ability so far.

Use Your Time Well

The first corollary of the Law of Capital says: "Your most precious resource is your time." Your time is really all you have to sell. How much time you put in and how much of yourself you put into that time, largely determines your earning ability. Poor time management is one of the major reasons for poor productivity and underachievement in every industry. It is the number one problem for both managers and salespeople in every field.

Invest Yourself Carefully

The second corollary of the Law of Capital says: "Time and money can be either spent or invested." One of the smartest things that you can do is to invest three percent of your earnings every month back into yourself on personal and professional development, on becoming better at the most important things you do. In fact, if you just invested as much in your mind each year as you do in your car, that alone could make you wealthy.
Invest one hour of your time reading in your field every day. Listen to audio programs in your car. Attend every course that can advance you in your career. Get personal and professional coaching to help you to get the very best out of yourself.

Get Better At the Things You Do

There is nothing that will give you a bigger and better "bang" for your buck than reinvesting a part of your time and money back into your capability to earn even more. All wealthy and successful Americans have learned this sooner or later, and all poor and unhappy Americans are still trying to figure it out.

Increase Your Return on Life

The third corollary of the Law of Capital says: "One of the best investments of your time and money is to increase your earning ability."

The purpose of corporate strategic planning is to increase "return on equity" or ROE. This requires organizing and reorganizing corporate activities so that the company is earning a higher return on the capital invested in the organization. In your work life, your personal equity is your mental and emotional capital. Your job then is to earn the highest possible return on your human capital, to increase your "return on energy." This way of viewing yourself must become a key part of your attitude throughout your work life.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do to apply this law immediately:

First, take a list of your output responsibilities, the things you do that represent accomplishments, not activities. Examine the list and rank the tasks by priority, on the basis of the value of the work to your company.

Second, take a list of all the things you do, day in and day out. Take this list to your boss and ask him or her to rank your tasks in terms of how valuable he or she considers them to be. Then resolve to work on your most valuable tasks every minute of every day.

The Three Factors of Time

Organize Your Life Around Your Family, Your Career and Your Personal Goals

You need to stand back on a regular basis and analyze yourself, your life and your time usage. You need to become a master of your time rather than a slave to continuing time pressures.

Your Most Precious Resource

Time is your most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing you have. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value. All work requires time. And time is absolutely essential for the important relationships in your life. The very act of taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin to improve your personal time management immediately.

The Starting Point

Personal time management begins with you. It begins with your thinking through what is really important to you in life. And it only makes sense if you organize it around specific things that you want to accomplish. You need to set goals in three major areas of your life. First, you need family and personal goals. These are the real reasons why you get up in the morning, why you work hard and upgrade your skills, why you worry about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the demands on your time.

Decide Upon Your Goals

What are your personal and family goals, both tangible and intangible? A tangible family goal could be a bigger house, a better car, a larger television set, a vacation, or anything else that costs money. An intangible goal would be to build a higher quality relationship with your spouse and children, to spend more time with your family going for walks or reading books. Achieving these family and personal goals are the real essence of time management, and its major purpose.

How to Achieve Your Goals

The second area of goals is your business and career goals. These are the "how" goals, the means by which you achieve your personal, "why" goals. How can you achieve the level of income that will enable you to fulfill your family goals? How can you develop the skills and abilities to stay ahead of the curve in your career? Business and career goals are absolutely essential, especially when balanced with family and personal goals.

Personal Development Goals

The third type of goals is your personal development goals. Remember, you can't achieve much more on the outside than what you have achieved and become on the inside. Your outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and your career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development. You must build yourself if you want to build your life. Perhaps the greatest secret of success is that you can become anything you really want to become to achieve any goal that you really want to achieve. But in order to do it, you must go to work on yourself and never stop.

Action Exercises

Here are three things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, develop the habit of stopping on a regular basis and thinking about what is really important to you. The more often you stop and think, the better decisions you will make.

Second, decide clearly upon your personal and family goals. Write them down. Discuss them with others. Be clear about why you are doing what you do.

Third, take some time to think about your career goals and the steps you will have to take to achieve them. Do something every day that moves you forward in all three areas.

Earn the Respect of Others

The Most Important Measure of Success

Being respected by others is very important to each of us. A survey done by the Gallup organization found that the most prominent living people rated the respect of others as the most important measure of success in life. They worked very hard to earn the respect of their parents, the respect of their spouses and children, the respect of their peers and colleagues, and the respect of mankind at large.

Why You Respect Yourself

It seems that we truly respect ourselves only when we feel that we are respected by others, and we will go to great lengths to earn and keep that respect. When we feel that someone respects us for who we are and what we have accomplished, we tend to be more open to that person's influence.

Two Things You Can Do

We can do two things to put ourselves in a position to be respected by others. The first is to develop our knowledge of our field. The more people perceive you know about your subject, the more they will respect you. The highest-paid people in almost every field are those who know more than the average people. They are recognized as experts, and they develop what is called "expert power." Because of their superior knowledge, they are looked up to and listened to, and they are much more capable of influencing others to act in a particular way than they would be if their knowledge level were just average.

Develop Your Expertise

Another way to put ourselves in a position of being respected by others is to develop your expertise. Expertise is closely tied to knowledge, but it is a little different. Expertise is the ability to do, the ability to perform well in your chosen field. Men and women with expertise are those who practice over and over in whatever they do until they become known far and wide as the very best in their field.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, study your field in detail. Dedicate at least one hour per day to reading, listening to audio programs, studying to become more and more knowledgeable about what you do.
Second, continually upgrade your knowledge and skills in your field. Identify your weakest important skill and go to work on that.
Knowledge and know-how are the keys to the 21st century.

Programming Yourself for Success

Your mission statement is always written in the present tense, as though you have already become the person that you have described. It is always positive rather than negative. And it is always personal.

Program Yourself Correctly

Your subconscious mind can only accept your mission statement as a set of commands when you phrase it in the present, positive and personal tenses. "I am an exceptional salesperson," is a perfect example. After every sales call, you should quickly reread your mission statement and ask yourself if your recent behavior was more like the person you want to be, or less? As a top sales performer, you are always comparing your sales activities against a high standard and adjusting your activities upward. You're continually striving to be better. Every day in every way, you are deliberately working to become more like the ideal person you have envisioned.

Determine Your Mission Statement

Your goal is that, a year from today, when one of your customers has lunch with one of your prospects, and your prospect asks your customer to describe you in detail as a salesperson, your customer will recite your business mission statement voluntarily. The way you have treated your customer will have been so exemplary that your customer will describe you in the most glowing of terms.

Compare Yourself Against Yourself

Once you have developed a mission statement like this, you can read it, review it, edit it, and upgrade it regularly. You can add additional qualities to it and more clearly define the qualities you've already listed. It becomes your personal credo, your philosophy of life, your statement of beliefs and a guide to your behavior in all your interactions with others. Each day, you can evaluate your behaviors and compare them against the standard that you have set in this statement.

Shape Your Own Personality

Over time, a remarkable thing will happen. As you read and review your personal mission statement, you will find yourself, almost unconsciously, shaping your words and conforming your behaviors so that you are more and more like the ideal person you have defined. People will notice the change in you almost immediately. Over time, you will find that you are actually creating within yourself the kind of character and personality that you most admire in others. You will have become the molder and the shaper of your own personal destiny. After you have applied the ABC Method to your list, you will now be completely organized and ready to get more important things done faster.

Action Exercises

First, imagine that one of your customers was going to meet with one of your prospects. What would you want him to say about you? How could you behave with your customer to assure that he says these things?

Second, talk to yourself positively all the time. Feed your mind with positive messages that describe your goals and the person you want to be.

Transformational Leadership

Advancing Your Career

As your career advances, you move along the scale from employee, to supervisor to manager and finally, to leader. Managers, and some leaders, engage in what is called transactional leadership, the deployment and management of people and resources to get results.

Arouse Emotion In Others

However, at the highest end of the leadership scale, we come to what is called "transformational leadership." Transformational leadership is defined as leadership that arouses emotion, that taps into the emotional and spiritual resources of an organization. Transformational leadership empowers people to greatly exceed their previous levels of accomplishment.

Make People Feel Terrific

Empowerment is the key. Transformational leaders are those who can elicit extraordinary performance from ordinary men and women. The superior leader is like a catalyst in a chemical process that causes the other ingredients to work together in a superior fashion.

A Key Function of Leadership

Empowerment as a key function of leadership becomes even more important as the work force becomes dominated by members of the Generation X. These highly individualistic men and women are increasingly seeking higher meaning and purpose in their careers. They are not impressed by authority or hierarchy. If they don't get the satisfaction they are seeking from their work, they will go somewhere else. And the better they are at what they do, the more readily they will leave one job for another.

Provide the Emotional Glue

Transactional leadership is essential to getting the job done but transformational leadership is what provides the emotional glue that causes organizations and the people in them to excel.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to become a transformational leader and empower your people.

First, get excited about your work. The more excited and committed you are to your work, the more excited and committed will be the people around you. The leader always sets the tone for the department or organization.

Second, continually encourage and praise the people who work for you. The better you make people feel about themselves and their work, the more empowered they will feel and the more committed they will be to your company.

The Toughest Job

There Are No Buffers

Selling is one of the toughest jobs in the world. There are no buffers between you and the reality of daily difficulties, delays and disappointments. You often ride an emotional roller-coaster, up and down, that never seems to stop. You are all alone.

You Must Motivate Yourself

Like a front line soldier, you must get yourself up every day and go out to where the bullets of rejection fly. You must continually deal with the possibility that all your sales efforts could turn out to be in vain through no fault of your own. And you must keep on going in spite of this because your profession of selling requires it.

Face the Facts of Selling

Selling is hard. It always has and it always will be. Even for the best and most experienced salespeople, it is a continual effort. You can make it easier by developing your skills in the critical areas of prospecting, presenting and closing sales, but you can never make selling an easy profession. However, once you accept that selling is a hard way to make a living, it somehow becomes a little easier. When you stop expecting it to be something other than it is, much of the stress of selling goes out of it. As William James said, "The first step in dealing with any difficulty is to be willing to have it so."

Open Unlimited Opportunities

Selling is also a wonderful profession. It offers opportunities for the average person that are unimaginable in most countries. Your potential earnings are beyond what 95 percent of the world's population could ever hope for or expect. Because selling is difficult, your activities are valuable and important and they have to pay you very well for carrying them out. As you move to the top of your field, you can earn more than a person with ten or twelve years of university education. You can eventually become financially independent. Fully five percent of self-made millionaires in America are salespeople who do their jobs extremely well.

Make a Wonderful Living

As a salesperson, the reason that you can make a wonderful living for yourself and your family, achieve your goals and fulfill all of your aspirations, is because making the sale is difficult, and often, extremely difficult. And the longer the sales cycle, or the larger the dollar amount involved, the more that companies have to pay salespeople to do the work. When you are selling complicated or expensive products in a highly competitive market, and you do it well, you can become one of the highest paid people in your field, if not the world.

Be the Best at What You Do

You should get up every morning and give a silent prayer of thanks that selling is so difficult. If it was easy, the field would be flooded by amateurs and the amount you could earn would be greatly reduced. But because it is hellishly hard, by becoming very good at it, your future can be unlimited!

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, dedicate yourself to getting better and better at selling. The better you get at selling and closing, the easier and more enjoyable it is.

Second, be grateful that selling is a tough job. It keeps the weaklings and the mediocre out of the field and enables you to be even more successful.

Keeping Yourself Positive

The most important thing you do for your success is to take control of the suggestive elements in your environment. Be sure that what you are seeing and listening to is consistent with the goals you want to achieve.

Listen Your Way to Success

Listen to educational audio programs in your car. The average person drives 12,000 to 25,000 miles per year which works out to between 500 and 1,000 hours per year that the average person spends in his or her car. You can become an expert in your field by simply listening to educational audio programs as you drive from place to place.

Take Courses in Your Field

Attend seminars given by experts in your field. Take additional courses and learn everything you possibly can. Learn from the experts. Ask them questions, write them letters, read their books, read their articles and listen to people with proven track records in the area in which you want to be successful.

Get Around the Right People

Associate only with positive, success-oriented people. Get around winners. As we say, fly with the eagles. You can't fly with the eagles if you keep scratching with the turkeys. Get away from the go-nowhere types and above all, get away from negative people. Get away from negative coworkers. If you've got a negative boss, seriously consider changing jobs. Associating on a regular basis with negative people is enough in itself to condemn you to a life of underachievement, frustration and failure. Associate only with positive people. Get around winners.

Visualize Your Goals

The last thing before you sleep and the first thing in the morning, think about and visualize your goals as realities. See your goal as though it already existed. Your subconscious mind is only activated by affirmations and pictures that are received in the present tense. See your goal vividly just before you go to sleep. See yourself performing at your best. See the situations that you're facing working out exactly the way you want them to.

Feed Yourself Mental Pictures

See yourself living the kind of life that you want to live. See yourself with the kind of relationships, the kind of health, the kind of car, the kind of home you really want. Visualize just before you fall asleep at night. The first thing you do when you get up in the morning is to feed yourself mental pictures. Those are the two times of the day when your subconscious mind is most receptive to new programming, when you fall asleep and when you wake up.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do, all day long, to keep your mind and emotions focused on your goals and financial success:
First, listen to audio programs in your car and when you travel around. Continue feeding your mind with a stream of high-quality, educational, motivational material that moves you toward your goal.

Second, resolve to associate with positive, optimistic people most of the time. Get around winners and get away from negative people who criticize, condemn and complain. This can change your life as much as any other factor.

Excellence Combined With Integrity

How to set standards for excellence and back them with total integrity.

A Commitment to Excellence

Leaders have specific responsibilities and must fulfill certain requirements. One requirement of leadership is the ability to choose an area of excellence. Just as a good general chooses the terrain on which to do battle, an excellent leader chooses the area in which he and others are going to do an outstanding job. The commitment to excellence is one of the most powerful of all motivators. All leaders who change people and organizations are enthusiastic about achieving excellence in a particular area.

Be the Best!

The most motivational vision you can have for yourself and others is to "Be the best!" Many people don't yet realize that excellent performance in serving other people is an absolute, basic essential for survival in the economy of the future. Many individuals and companies still adhere to the idea that as long as they are no worse than anyone else, they can remain in business. That is just plain silly! It is prehistoric thinking. We are now in the age of excellence. Customers assume that they will get excellent quality, and if they don't, they will go to your competitors so fast, people's heads will spin.

Have A Vision of High Standards

As a leader, your job is to be excellent at what you do, to be the best in your chosen field of endeavor. Your job is to have a vision of high standards in serving people. You not only exemplify excellence in your own behavior, but you also translate it to others so that they, too, become committed to this vision.
This is the key to servant leadership. It is the commitment to doing work of the highest quality in the service of other people, both inside and outside the organization. Leadership today requires an equal focus on the people who must do the job, on the one hand, and the people who are expected to benefit from the job, on the other.

The Most Respected Quality

The second quality, which is perhaps the single most respected quality of leaders, is integrity. Integrity is complete, unflinching honesty with regard to everything that you say and do. Integrity underlies all the other qualities. Your measure of integrity is determined by how honest you are in the critical areas of your life.
Integrity means this: When someone asks you at the end of the day, "Did you do your very best?" you can look him in the eye and say, "Yes!" Integrity means this: When someone asks you if you could have done it better, you can honestly say, "No, I did everything I possibly could."

Integrity means that you, as a leader, admit your shortcomings. It means that you work to develop your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. Integrity means that you tell the truth, and that you live the truth in everything that you do and in all your relationships. Integrity means that you deal straightforwardly with people and situations and that you do not compromise what you believe to be true.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, identify the area of your work where excellent performance can contribute the very most to productivity and profits. Focus all your efforts in this area.

Second, do your very best on every task. Imagine that everyone is watching even when no one is watching. Imagine that everyone in your company was going to do their work exactly the way you do yours.

Never compromise your standards!

Relationships Are Everything

Your Foundation for Success

Relationship Selling is the core of all modern selling strategies. Your ability to develop and maintain long-term customer relationships is the foundation for your success as a salesperson and your success in business. Relationship selling requires a clear understanding of the dynamics of the selling process as they are experienced by your customer.

Propose a Business Marriage

For your customer, a buying decision usually means a decision to enter into a long-term relationship with you and your company. It is very much like a "business marriage." Before the customer decides to buy, he can take you or leave you. He doesn't need you or your company. He has a variety of options and choices open to him, including not buying anything at all. But when your customer makes a decision to buy from you and gives you money for the product or service you are selling, he becomes dependent on you. And since he has probably had bad buying experiences in the past, he is very uneasy and uncertain about getting into this kind of dependency relationship.

Fulfill Your Promises

What if you let the customer down? What if your product does not work as you promised? What if you don't service it and support it as you promised? What if it breaks down and he can't get it replaced? What if the product or service is completely inappropriate for his needs? These are real dilemmas that go through the mind of every customer when it comes time to make the critical buying decision.

Focus on the Relationship

Because of the complexity of most products and services today, especially high-tech products, the relationship is actually more important than the product. The customer doesn't know the ingredients or components of your product, or how your company functions, or how he will be treated after he has given you his money, but he can make an assessment about you and about the relationship that has developed between the two of you over the course of the selling process. So in reality, the customer's decision is based on the fact that he has come to trust you and believe in what you say.

Build a Solid Trust Bond

In many cases, the quality of your relationship with the customer is the competitive advantage that enables you to edge out others who may have similar products and services. The quality of the trust bond that exists between you and your customers can be so strong that no other competitor can get between you.

Keep Your Customers for Life

The single biggest mistake that causes salespeople to lose customers is taking those customers for granted. This is a form of "customer entropy." It is when the salesperson relaxes his efforts and begins to ignore the customer. Almost 70 percent of customers who walked away from their existing suppliers later replied that they made the change primarily because of a lack of attention from the company.

Once you have invested the time and made the efforts necessary to build a high-quality, trust-based relationship with your customer, you must maintain that relationship for the life of your business. You must never take it for granted.

Action Exercises

First, focus on building a high quality relationship with each customer by treating your customer so well that he comes back, buys again and refers you to his friends.

Second, pay attention to your existing customers. Tell them you appreciate them. Look for ways to thank them and encourage them to come back and do business with you again.

Think Like a Millionaire

Attitude is Everything

The most important attitude for financial success is long-term thinking. Successful people think a long way into the future and they adjust their daily behaviors to assure they achieve their long-term goals. In a longitudinal study done at Harvard University in the 50s and 60s, they studied the reasons for upward socio-economic mobility. They were looking for factors that would predict whether or not an individual or family was going to move upward and be wealthier in the future than in the present.

They studied factors like education, intelligence, being born into the right family, or having the right connections. In every case, they found individuals who had been born with every blessing in life who did poorly. They also found individuals who had been born or come to this country with no advantages at all who had been extremely successful. What was the distinguishing factor?
They finally determined that there was only one key attitude that mattered. They called it "Time Perspective." Time perspective refers to the amount of time that you take into consideration when planning your day to day activities and when making important decisions in your life.

Time Perspective

People with long-time perspective invariably move up economically in the course of their lifetimes. When you spend weeks, months and years developing your skills and ability and expanding your experience in order to be successful, you have long-time perspective. The average professional person has a time perspective of 10, 15 and 20 years.

Begin to see that everything that you are doing today is part of a long-time continuum, at the end of which you are going to be financially independent or financially unfortunate. People with short-time perspective think only about fun and pleasure in the short term. They have what economists call "The inability to delay gratification." They have an irresistible tendency to spend every single penny they earn and everything that they can borrow.

When you develop long-time perspective, you develop the discipline to delay gratification and to save your money rather than spending it. The combination of long-time perspective and delayed gratification puts you onto the high road to financial independence.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two things you can do to develop the attitudes of financially successful people:
First, think long-term about your financial life. Decide exactly how much you want to be worth five years, ten years and twenty years from today. Write it down. Make a plan. Take action on your plan every single day.
Second, develop the ability to delay gratification. Instead of buying something on impulse, put off buying decisions for a day, a week or even a month. Decide in advance to "think it over" before you buy anything. This can change the way you spend money almost immediately.

The Momentum Principle of Success

Fast tempo seems to go hand in hand with all great success. Developing this tempo requires that you start moving and keep moving at a steady rate.

The Key Action to Orientation

When you become an action-oriented person, you activate the "Momentum Principle" of success. This principle says that although it may take tremendous amounts of energy to overcome inertia and get going initially, it then takes far less energy to keep going.

Increase Your Energy

The good news is that the faster you move, the more energy you have. The faster you move, the more you get done and the more effective you feel. The faster you move, the more experience you get and the more you learn. The faster you move, the more competent and capable you become at your work.

Get Onto the Fast Track

A sense of urgency shifts you automatically onto the fast track in your career. The faster you work and the more you get done, the higher will be your levels of self-esteem, self-respect and personal pride.

Talk to Yourself Positively

One of the simplest and yet most powerful ways to get yourself started is to repeat the words, "Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!" over and over to yourself. If you feel yourself slowing or becoming distracted by conversations or low value activities, repeat to yourself the words, "Back to work! Back to work! Back to work!" over and over.

Get A Reputation for Speed

In the final analysis, nothing will help you more in your career than for you to get the reputation for being the kind of person who gets important work done quickly and well. This reputation will make you one of the most valuable and respected people in your field.

Action Exercises

Practice makes perfect! Pick up the tempo! Whatever you are doing, resolve to move faster than ever before.

Break Away From Old Ideas

Highly creative people tend to have fluid, flexible, adaptive minds. Here are three statements that creative people can make easily and which you learn by regular practice.

Admit It When You Are Wrong

The first is simply, "I was wrong." Many people are so concerned with being right that all their mental energy is consumed by stonewalling, bluffing, blaming and denying. If you're wrong, admit it and get on to the solution or the next step.

Face Up to Mistakes

Second, non-creative people think that it is a sign of weakness to say, "I made a mistake." On the contrary, it is actually a sign of mental maturity, personal strength and individual character. Remember, everybody makes mistakes every single day.

Be Flexible With New Information

The third statement that creative people use easily is, "I changed my mind." It is amazing how many uncomfortable situations people get into and stay in because they are unwilling or afraid to admit that they've changed their minds.

Be Willing to Cut Your Losses

If you get new information or if you find that you feel differently about a previous decision, accept that you have changed your mind and don't let anyone or anything back you into a corner. If a decision does not serve your best interests as you see them now, have the ego-strength and the courage to "cut your losses," to change your mind and then get on to better things.

Action Exercises

Here are two ways you can break out of narrow thinking patterns and become more creative.
First, be willing to admit that you are not perfect, you make mistakes, you are wrong on a regular basis. This is a mark of intelligence and courage.
Second, with new information, be willing to change your mind. Most of what you know about your business today will change completely in the coming years so be the first to recognize it.

The Central Skill

Time management is the central skill of success. Your ability to manage your time, to focus and channel your energies on your highest value tasks, will determine your rewards and your level of accomplishment in life more than any other factor.

Success Leaves Tracks

When I began searching for the secrets of success many years ago, I discovered an interesting principle: success leaves tracks. A wise man who had studied success for more than 50 years concluded that the greatest success principle of all was, "learn from the experts."

Learn From the Experts

If you want to be a big success in any area, find out what other successful people in that area are doing, and do the same things, until you get the same results. In recent study of interviews, speeches, biographies and autobiographies of successful men and women, It was found that they all had one quality in common. They were all described as being "extremely well organized." They used their time very, very well. They were highly productive and they got vastly more done in the same period of time than the average person.

Be Both Effective and Efficient

High performing men and women were both effective and efficient. They did the right things, and they did them in the right way. They were constantly looking for ways to improve the quality and quantity of their output. As a result, their contribution to their organizations was vastly higher and therefore much better paid, than the contributions of the average person.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, develop a study plan today to learn from the experts in your field. This can save you years of hard work.

Second, decide what is the most important thing to do, and then decide how to do it.

How to Identify Your Goals

Here are seven goal-setting questions for you to ask and answer over and over again. I suggest that you take a pad of paper and write out your responses.

Question Number One:

What are your five most important values in life?
This question is intended to help you clarify what is really important to you, and by extension, what is less important, or unimportant. Once you have identified the five most important values in life for you, organize them in order of priority, from number one, the most important, through number five.

Question Number Two:

What are your three most important goals in life, right now?
This is called the "quick list" method. When you only have thirty seconds to write down your three most important goals, your subconscious mind sorts out your many goals quickly. Your top three will just pop into your conscious mind. With only thirty seconds, you will be as accurate as if you had thirty minutes.

Question Number Three:

What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you learned today that you only had six months to live?
This is another value questions to help you clarify what is really important to you. When your time is limited, even if only in your imagination, you become aware of who and what you really care about.

Question Number Four:

What would you do if you won a million dollars cash, tax free, in the lottery tomorrow?

How would you change your life? What would you buy? What would you start doing, or stop doing? This is really a question to help you decide what you'd do if you had all the time and money you need, and if you had virtually no fear of failure at all.

Question Number Five:

What have you always wanted to do, but been afraid to attempt?
This question helps you see more clearly where your fears could be blocking you from doing what you really want to do.

Question Number Six:

What do you most enjoy doing? What gives you your greatest feeling of self-esteem and personal satisfaction?

This is another values question that may indicate where you should explore to find your "heart's desire." You will always be most happy doing what you most love to do, and what you most love to do is invariably the activity that makes you feel the most alive and fulfilled. The most successful men and women are invariably doing what they really enjoy, most of the time.

Question Number Seven:

What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you would not fail?

Imagine that a genie appears and grants you one wish. The genie guarantees that you will be absolutely, completely successful in any one thing that you attempt to do, big or small, short or long-term. If you were absolutely guaranteed success in any one thing, what one exciting goal would you set for yourself?

Action Exercise

Study the pad of paper that you used to answer these questions. This paper represents your future goals. Look at what you wrote every day and shape your life the way you see it on that paper.

Self-Image in Selling

Why Your Self-Image is a Key Part of Your Personality

Your self-image is the way you see yourself and think about yourself. It is often called your "inner mirror." You look into this mirror in every situation to see how you should perform on the outside. You always behave on the outside in a manner consistent with the picture you have of yourself on the inside.

How Do You See Yourself

For example, if you see yourself, as calm, confident and competent in any aspect of selling, when you are engaged in that activity, you will feel calm, confident and competent. You will be positive and happy. You will perform well and get excellent results. If, for any reason, it doesn't go well at that time, you will throw it off and dismiss it as a temporary situation. Your self-image is clear. In your mind's eye you see yourself as good and capable in that area, and nothing can interfere with your mental picture.

Change Your Self-Image

The most rapid improvements in sales results come from changing your self-image. The moment that you see yourself differently, you behave differently as well. And because you are behaving differently, you get different results.

My Own Story

Some years ago, when I was selling mobile phones over the phone in the UK market, I would end my pitch by emailing the prospect an outlining of the package benefits and encourage him to "think about it." My self-image was such that I could not bring myself to ask the prospect to make a buying decision. All day long, I would call different people pitching my product and leaving an email with descriptions to read. And as you might imagine, I was not making any sales. When I called people back after they had time to think about it, they would invariably say that they were not interested.

The Turning Point

I was getting desperate. I was living from hand to mouth at the time. Although I was seeing lots of prospects, I was making very few sales. Then I had a revelation which changed my career at the time. I realized that it was my fear of asking for the order that was causing all my problems. It was not my prospects. It was me. I needed to change my self-image and thereby change my behavior if I wanted results to improve.

Make A Decision

The very next morning, I made the decision that I would not call back on a prospect. The size of the purchase was small and, when I had completed my pitch, the prospect would know everything that he needed to know to make a decision. There was no benefit or advantage of leaving material over the email or giving the prospect several days to think about it. At my very first call, and I still remember it, when I had finished my presentation, the prospect said, "Let me think it over." I smiled and told him that I did not make call backs because I was too busy, and then I said, "You know everything you need to know to make a decision right now. Why don't you just take it?" I remember him shrugging his shoulders and saying, "OK. I'll take it. How would you like to be paid?"

Double Your Earnings

I walked out of that sales floor on a cloud. That very day I tripled my sales. That week, I sold more than anyone else in the company. By the end of the month, they had made me a Team Leader with 20 people under me. I went from making one or two sales per week to making ten or fifteen sales per week. I went from worrying about money to a large salary with an override on the activities of all my salespeople. My sales life took off and, with few exceptions, it never stopped. And the turning point was that conscious choice to modify my self-image and make it more consistent with the results I wanted rather than the results that I was getting.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, begin to see yourself the way you want to be. See yourself as strong, confident, competent and professional in every way. The person you see is the person you will be.
Second, identify an area of selling where your own ideas about yourself and the situation are holding you back. You always perform on the outside the way you see yourself on the inside.