Remember the “Little Engine Who Could” from childhood? If not, visit your bookstore and while you’re there check out Dr Seuss’s “Oh! The Places You’ll Go”.

Selling is a contact profession. We interact with personalities, big and small egos, honesty and dishonesty, consensus problems, fear, money and its associated baggage.

This week Frank Belzar and I interviewed Minh Pham who, with other experts, including Dave Kurlan, authored “Stepping Stones to Success”. In Minh's chapter he talks about actualizing your true potential. His work offers great lessons for the Sales profession. 

One of his most important messages is “clean house”. Identify your head trash, negative self talk and fear and start taking the trash out regularly. The “Little Engine Who Could” didn’t spend time on what wouldn’t or couldn’t happen. If he had he wouldn’t have reached the top of the mountain.

Minh also says that when it comes to change you need to act you way into it and not think your way into it. If you think before you act your fear and head trash will almost certainly talk you out of it. In the film “Anger Management” Jack Nicholson calls this “Self Hypnotic Negative Imagery”.

I’ve used Dr Seuss’s book to begin many training programs. Why? First, it is a story and we all love a good story but more importantly, salespeople spend too much time worrying about what has already happened and what might happen. This means they are not truly conscious. Put another way we aren’t present because we are spending our time thinking about the past and or the future. Dr Seuss nails this.

Selling is just an illustration of life, full of twists and turns, successes and failures and what we call surprises. Get used to change, embrace it, have fun with it, and stop fighting it.  The primary objective of selling is to achieve an outcome, preferably a sale. Success comes though your ability to navigate the journey and manage your head trash.

 

Frank Belzer's post about Chinese work ethic and competition highlights something most people don't want to think about. The competitive landscape has changed forever.

Putting aside the impact of increased globalization, and the rise of China and India, America's challenges with the deficit, tax and monetary policy and unemployment just to mention a few:  they aren't going away anytime soon.

People are smarter and more cautious, armed with information which may well be inaccurate.  Witness the healthcare debate, under tremendous pressure to make the "correct decision", fearful about losing their jobs and feeling stressed out and overwhelmed.

Competition comes in many forms and from different places. It's direct or indirect, external and internal, foreign or domestic, price based or value based and outside your control or self-inflected. Success will be more difficult to achieve than ever before and, like the economic situation, this won't change anytime soon. 

I'll leave you with some questions to ask and find answers to:

• How do prospects and customers see you, as vendors or someone of higher value?
• Do you and your company position yourselves as advisors and, if so, do you act the part?
• Do you know specifically what your competition does better than you?
• Are you doing everything you can to impact the sales process even when you are not in control?
• How has your value proposition been affected by the economy?
• Are you mentally and emotionally tough enough to fight through these changing conditions to ultimately prosper?

Recently I spoke to a CEO who was frustrated by the performance of one division in his company.  He concluded he needed to hire a new sales team. He could articulate the compelling reasons for change and the negative impact this non-performance was having on the business.

When I asked him what the current sales leader's role would be in the future, as well as his own (CEO's) role in managing the new staff, he became defensive. He understood that the current sales leader was a big part of the problem and was very frustrated by this, but his willingness to make changes and his approach to solving the problem was another story.

Are you a leader who doesn't like the nitty gritty of sales management? Are you hoping your salespeople will be successful entirely on their own? Are you expecting a different outcome without changing how you lead and manage?

If so what are you really saying?  Perhaps it sounds like this. "All I want is to hire someone who knows exactly what to do with all the right contacts, that doesn't need or want help and will overachieve on their own".

When was the last time you hired anyone like that and how quickly after you hired them did they fail or start their own company?