I am involved in various businesses to do with stuttering, selling composite doors and jobs in foster care.
Success in business has nothing whatsoever to do with salesmanship, little to do with a knowledge of your company’s products or services.
It is owing to some far more basic fundamental principles which will determine your success or failure at anything you do in life.
They are your A,B,C’s, Attitude, Belief and Consistency. Taking them in reverse order.
Consistency
We get up every morning, we brush our teeth wash, get dressed have breakfast. We are consistent in our actions. We do it every day. It does not really matter how many days we choose to work but it is important that we are consistent with the way in which we work. We need the 6 marbles in our left pocket or left side of our bag and transfer 1 marble to the other side every time we have carried out a positive action i.e. seeing a customer, talking to someone about the business, etc. etc. We need to do it consistently. We need to have transferred all 6 marbles (better still 10) by the end of the day. Our focus should be on the actions rather than the end result. I’ll repeat that, we need to concentrate on the actions not on the results.
When we go mountain climbing, if we would continually look at the summit we would soon trip up and fall. We need to concentrate on every step at a time, one after the other and as surely as the sun goes down we will reach our summit.
Belief
An absolute and genuine belief in our business, it’s products and services and what it can give it’s customers.
Attitude
Possibly the most important of these three but useless on its own. If you are keeping yourself to yourself then having a positive attitude will not really be of any benefit to you. So what is attitude apart from how one feels about oneself and others. This is how I would describe it.
Your face is transparent, totally transparent and your attitude shines through whether it’s positive or negative. Another description of attitude, when I took my 14 year old daughter recently to Disneyland Paris we went one evening to an aquatic circus. Very unusual, people diving, dancing and somersaulting on water. It was a spectacular show. What made it even more enjoyable (we were sitting on the front row) was the fact that all the performers without exception were obviously really enjoying themselves. They were loving every minute of it and gave it their all. Their attitude really shone through like a beacon and this made our enjoyment total. Your clients will notice it and will make their choices and decisions based upon what they see. We all know that the first thing any salesperson has to sell is themselves even before they open their mouth. If they can’t sell themselves they might as well turn round and go home and go back to bed. If they can’t sell themselves they wouldn’t be able to sell packet of peanuts or a Mars bar.