10 Keys to Success in Selling

10 Keys to Success in Selling

Success in selling doesn’t just drop like a dew in the morning. You have to plan and work for it.

Author and famous motivational speaker Brian Tracy often share about the law of cause and

effect. This law says that for every effect, such as high income, there is a specific cause, or causes. If you

do what other successful people do, you will eventually get the same results that they do.

He then shares about the 10 keys to fast track your sales career.

1. Do what you love to do

Learn to love your work and commit yourself to becoming excellent in your field. Invest whatever amount of time is necessary; pay any price; go any distance, make any sacrifice to become the very best at what you do. Sadly, the majority of people will often spend their entire lives selling and it will never occur to them that they should commit themselves to becoming excellent in doing it.

The good news is that you do not have to be the best in the world to live an extraordinary life. Success in sales goes to the person who is just a little better in the critical areas of selling. If you take the time and make the effort, if you really put your whole heart into what you are doing and learn to love the profession of selling, you will move into the big-money ranks of sales professionals.

2. Decide Exactly What You Want

Be clear about what you want. Don’t be wishy-washy. Decide exactly what it is you want in life. Set it as a goal and then determine what price you are going to have to pay to get it. Most people never do this.

According to the research, only about 3 percent of adults have written goals. And these are the most successful and highest-paid people in every field. They are the movers and shakers, the creators and innovators, the top salespeople and entrepreneurs. Almost everyone works for them.

Have a goal. Write it down. Set at least 10 goals to accomplished. When you get up in the morning, think about these goals. As you work through the day, think about these goals. Discuss these goals with the important people in your life. In the evening, before you go to sleep, think about these goals and what it will look like when you achieve it. Continually visualize your goals as if it were already a reality. Resolve in advance that you will never quit until you achieve this goal. Failure is not an alternative!

3. Back Your Goal with Persistence and Determination

Once you begin, refuse to even consider the possibility of failure. Back your goal with perseverance and indomitable willpower. Decide to throw your whole heart and soul into your success and into achieving that goal.

Don’t hold anything back. Make a complete commitment. Resolve that nothing will stop you or discourage you.

The Greek philosopher Epictetus once said, “Circumstances do not make the man; they simply reveal him to himself.”

Adversity shows you what you are made of. As my friend Charlie Jones says, “It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce, that counts.”

You can always tell how successful you are going to be by how quickly you bounce back. Your degree of resilience is the mark and measure of your character. Your ability to take the hard work and rough shocks of selling, and to keep on keeping on, is the ultimate determinant of your success.

4. Commit to Lifelong Learning

Your mind is your most precious asset, and the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. Commit yourself to lifelong learning. I cannot emphasize this too often.

Read, listen to audio programs, attend seminars and courses, and never forget that the most valuable asset you will ever have is your mind.

But your mind can be made to appreciate in value. If you purchase a car, it begins to depreciate, to lose its value as soon as you drive it off the dealer’s lot. If you buy any kind of physical object, it begins to deteriorate immediately. You can increase the value of your mind by continually feeding it new information that you can use to get better results.

If you are not continually learning and growing, the knowledge you have is actually diminishing. The incompetent person of tomorrow is the person who has stopped learning today. The illiterate person is the person who is no longer learning, growing, and increasing his value every single day. The person who does not read is no better than the person who cannot read.

Resolve that you are going to learn and practice something new each day. Read every morning, listen to audio programs in your car, take all the training you can get, and continually put your new knowledge into action.

5. Use Your Time Well

Your time is all you have to sell. It is your primary asset. How you use your time determines your standard of living. Resolve therefore to use your time well.

Because of the 80/20 rule, some things you do are worth vastly more than other things, even though they take the same number of minutes and hours. Your goal is to focus on those activities that contribute the very most value to your life and your work.

Begin every day with a list. The best time to make up your work list is the night before, prior to wrapping up for the day. Write down everything that you have to do the next day, starting with your fixed appointments and then moving on to everything you can think of. Never work without a list.

Time management experts say that you will increase your productivity by 25 percent, or gain two extra hours per day, by the very act of planning your day in advance. Your list becomes the key to your time and life management system.

6. Follow the Leaders

Do what successful people do. Follow the leaders, not the followers. Do what the top people in your field do. Imitate the ones who are going somewhere with their lives.

Follow the people who are achieving the kind of things that you want to achieve sometime in the future.

Look around you. Who are the people that you admire the most? Which ones are getting the results that you want to achieve in the months and years ahead? Identify the very best people in your field and pattern yourself after them. Decide to be like them.

Associate with them as much as possible.

If you want to know how to be a successful salesperson, go to the top people in your business and ask them for advice. Ask them what books you should read and what audio programs you should listen to. Ask them what courses you should take. Inquire about their attitudes, philosophies, and approaches to their work and their customers.

7. Character is Everything

Guard your integrity as a sacred thing. Nothing is more important to the quality of your life in our society. In business and sales success, you must have credibility. You can only be successful if people trust you and believe in you.

In study after study, the element of trust has been identified as the most important distinguishing factor between one salesperson and another, and one company and another.

As Stephen Covey says, “If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy.” Honesty means that you always keep your word, and you always tell the truth.

8. Unlock Your Inborn Creativity

Think of yourself as a highly intelligent person, even a genius. Recognize that you have great reserves of creativity that you have never used. Say aloud, over and over, “I’m a genius! I’m a genius! I’m a genius!”

This may sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. The fact is that every person has the ability to perform at genius levels in one or more areas. You have within you, right now, the ability to do more and be more than you ever have before. You have the inborn capacity to exceed all your previous accomplishments. You have enormous reserves of creativity and intelligence. As Dennis Waitley says, “You have more potential than you could use in 100 lifetimes.

How to detect your special talents?

Ask yourself the following questions:

What do you enjoy doing?

What absorbs your attention completely?

What are the things you love learning about?

What are the things you love to talk about?

What is the thing that’s easy to learn and easy for you to do?

9. Practice the Golden Rule

Practice the Golden Rule in all your interactions with others: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Think about yourself as a customer. How would you like to be treated? Obviously, you would want a salesperson to be straightforward with you. You would want her to take the time to thoroughly understand your problem or need and then show you, step by step, how her solution could help you improve your life or work in a cost-effective way.

You would appreciate honesty and straight dealing. You would want the salesperson to explain the weaknesses as well as the strengths of her product. You would then want the salesperson to follow through on her promises and to fulfill her commitments to

you. If this is what you would want from a salesperson selling to you, then be sure to give this to every customer you talk to.

10. Pay the Price of Success

Finally, and perhaps more important than anything else, resolve to work hard. This is one of the great keys to success in life. In the background research for The Millionaire Next Door, Drs. Stanley and Danko interviewed thousands of self-made millionaires, asking them to what they attributed their success. An astounding 85 percent of self-made millionaires in America admitted that they were no more intelligent or talented than others, but that they “worked much harder” than anyone else, for a much longer time.

The key to success in selling is for you to start a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later. Do the little things that average people always try to avoid doing.

When you begin your workday, resolve to “work all the time you work.” Don’t waste time. Get going. Move fast. Develop a sense of urgency, a bias for action.