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CHAPTER NINETEEN

SUCCESS IN SELLING

Treat success as your duty, obligation, and responsibility, not as a choice or as a job!

The best advice I can give you about success in any field is to make being successful an ethical issue, not a financial issue or even a technical issue. Almost all people claim they want success, but most people approach it as only a possible option. Approach anything as an option or a maybe, and I assure you that it will NEVER be yours.

Did you know that less than 2 percent of all the households in America made $250,000 last year? Why? Well either the whole system is set up against 98 percent of the people, or 98 percent of the people are treating success as something that may or may not happen. Look, the reality is that the top earners are not smarter than you, nor do they work harder. One of the major reasons more people don’t create success for themselves is because they never commit to it. They leave it to the economy, timing, and other happenstance that they have no control over.

Let’s face it, most people don’t even get close to creating the kind of life they want, and even fewer create the kind of life they have the potential to create. People claim they want a successful relationship, claim they want financial freedom, claim they want a successful, solvent business, claim they want more money, and claim they want to be millionaires, but then they don’t go after these wants with a relentless, undying, gotta-have-it-now kind of pursuit.

ASK YOURSELF THESE QUESTIONS

Are you fulfilling your potential? (Be honest.)

Do you approach success as a duty and obligation?

Would more success be bad for you?

Is your entire family on one plan for the creation of success?

If you answered no to any of the above, your chances at success are doubtful in any field. Your problem will not be sales as a profession, it will be that you haven’t made a commitment to SUCCESS as your obligation and duty. In sales, like any other field, you will have to demand success, otherwise it will elude you. Quit approaching success as an option, and your chances of reaching your dreams will rise exponentially. I can assure you that if you don’t consider it your duty to live up to your potential, then you simply won’t live up to your potential. If success doesn’t become an ethical issue for you—an obsession and a must—then you won’t do what is necessary to attain it. Many suggest that success is a journey rather than a destination. After building four businesses from scratch, I can tell you that while success may be a journey, it is more important to understand that the journey is filled with many unexpected obstacles, and lots of people are on the same journey. Other people and obstacles will attempt to stop you from reaching your destination. Those who make a commitment to success as a destination will last longer than those who are just on a journey.

One of the greatest turning points in my sales career occurred when I finally woke up to the fact that if I was going to be successful in sales, I had to make it a priority—a career, not a job. When I stopped thinking about selling casually and committed to knowing everything there was to know about it, I started to create success. When I started approaching selling as my way to create success and took it on as a duty, obligation, and responsibility, like a military mission, the obstacles that came with selling started to just fade away. I began to see that my sales success wasn’t for others or “the lucky,” or something that happened one week but not the next.

Even the most fortunate and well-connected people among us must do something to put themselves in the right places, at the right times, in front of the right people. Luck is just one of the by-products of those who take the most action and are the most prepared. The reason that successful salespeople seem lucky is because their success naturally allows for more success. Unless you are privy to the action, you don’t see or hear about the number of times the top salespeople went for it and failed. Luck will not make you successful; committing yourself to success completely is the way to be lucky.

You have to approach your sales success the way good parents approach their duty to their children: As an honor, an obligation, and a priority. Be committed to your career, your product, the company you work for, and to your client as a duty, obligation, and responsibility. As in the chapter “The Most Important Sale,” you have to stay completely committed at all levels. Good parents will do whatever it takes to care for children: Get up in the middle of the night; clothe, feed, and fight for them; take care of them; and even put their own lives at risk to protect them. This is the same way you must approach your sales career.

BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF: NEVER JUSTIFY FAILURE

It is fairly common for people who are not succeeding in sales to start justifying why they are not being successful. Some even start to lie to themselves. It’s easy to spot this trend in the sales industry in the people who were once doing well and who are now making more and more excuses for why they are not succeeding. Read the “10X Rule” chapter about excuses where I go over all the excuses people use on themselves.

When young children, for example, are unable to get what they want, they ask nicely, then they get disappointed, then they start to insist on having what they want, and maybe even fight for a little while and cry for a bit. Then, toward the end of the cycle, when they have been told that they cannot have what they asked for, they start to convince themselves that they never wanted it in the first place. Sell or Be Sold. All children usually have to do is go through the cycle a few more times before the parent is worn down. When you aren’t honest with yourself, you give up! There is NO reason or excuse good enough for you not to get what you want or need! Clearly you aren’t always going to make the sale, but please don’t fail to make one sale and then spend the rest of the afternoon selling yourself lies and excuses about why it wasn’t important or why you weren’t successful.

Be honest with yourself on every sales cycle. Ask yourself, “Why didn’t I get that sale? What could I have done differently? Where did I miss it? How could I have better justified the cost? Where could I have gotten them financing? Why didn’t I get in front of the decision maker? I only asked for the order twice —” Be honest, brutally honest, with yourself, and take complete responsibility for the outcome. Don’t let your coworkers console you that it’s all right, the customer wasn’t ready, they didn’t have the money, they are cheap, they are a difficult group to sell, they never buy, they can’t make decisions, our product is too high, we don’t have the right inventory, the economy sucks—please stop it. You are boring me and killing yourself by not being honest.

Your sales success will come about as the result of your mental, spiritual, and technically prepared claim to create and own it, followed by taking necessary actions that persist over time until you succeed in reaching your sales goals. If you are not able to be brutally honest with yourself about why you didn’t make the sale, you will forever find your results dwindling. And when your success dwindles, you will see your actions start to do the same.

In order to demand consistent sales success, you have to:

Decide you are ultimately responsible for the sale.

Make it your duty, obligation, and responsibility to make the sale.

Take massive amounts of action, followed by more action until the sale is made!

Accept no excuses, reasons, or logic, and figure out how to make it work!

Prepare yourself daily to handle all obstacles, stalls, reasons, and barriers you will encounter with a client. See Cardone University at www.CardoneUniversity.com.