Issued by: SALESGURU Publishing


Do they want great closers? Sure. Salespeople with great contacts? Fantastic. All those things are great. But ultimately, many of the soft skills in sales can be taught, and that is precisely why your sales leaders have subscribed you to SALESGURU.

What cannot be taught, is Attitude. Passion. Energy. Get-up-and-Go. Motivation. Drive. For the most part, if you don't have this naturally, you probably never will.

The failure of motivational teaching
The great failure of motivational teaching is that it suggests you can radically alter your attitude by thinking differently or meditating for half an hour in the morning or whatever. It denies one central truth however: if you don't already have an attitude for self-improvement, you wouldn't have picked up that motivational book, pressed play on that CD or attended that seminar in the first place. Just know this: most people never do. And the greatest irony of all is that they are precisely the people who could ideally benefit the most if only they would recognise their need to change.

But in fact, most sales leaders will tell you that in their experiences you cannot teach motivation. You cannot teach someone to leap out of bed in the morning and embrace the challenges of the day when their natural instinct is to press the snooze button and grab 15 minutes more.
Motivation comes from within.

The ‘Sales' Attitude
So what are the biggest signs of an attitude that is well suited to sales success? These are the things that sales leaders tell us they want the most - and the things they tell us they hate the most.

Ten key benefits of a great attitude

1. You handle rejection well
   Rejection is a big part of sales. You sell to far fewer people than you pitch, generally. Salespeople with a great attitude know that just because someone doesn't want your insurance policy or car or kettle or whatever it is you are selling, doesn't mean that they dislike, disrespect or care less for you. In fact, more often than not, you and your product are unrelated to the prospect. They just don't want what you're selling. There's no shame in that.
2. You have persistence
   Salespeople with a great attitude know that nobody is ‘ignoring' them by not returning their calls ... until such time as the prospect gets on the line and says “Please stop calling me.” That doesn't mean you should pester prospects into submission, but rather that you give them the benefit of the doubt when they don't call you back, that they have really been busy, or perhaps travelling, or that they just have other priorities. When you get them on the phone, if you have a great attitude, you'll be delighted to speak to them as if they picked up on the very first ring.
3. You get on well with people
   Sales is a people game, right? You are going to meet lots and lots of them in every sales day, and salespeople with a great attitude don't carry any petty prejudices or pre-conceived notions into their meetings with them. They always ask “what seems great about this person?”
4. People like YOU
   It is true often enough to be a rule of sorts: if you like people, they probably like you. And because salespeople with a great attitude genuinely like people, people genuinely like them too. They like the openness, the positive energy, the passion and the respect, understanding and genuine interest that are natural parts of such salespeople's character.
5. You are methodical
   Not all of sales is fun, but even the admin stuff is important, and salespeople with a great attitude know that. Like athletes that embrace a punishing training regimen before a big sporting event, salespeople know that it is all worth it when the results are announced. Great things usually require some measure of sacrifice. Salespeople with a great attitude know this.
6. You are realistic
   You are brave enough to embrace big challenges, but sensible enough to know your limits. Sure we all want to go after the biggest accounts, but salespeople with a great attitude know that first they have to prove themselves. You can generally trust what a salesperson with a great attitude predicts as targeted revenue because they have a realistic view of their pipeline, their customers' budgets and how far along a customer or prospect really is in terms of signing that order.
7. You have high, positive energy
   Salespeople with a great attitude make the decision every morning that they are going to have a positive day. No matter what they are facing, they are grateful for what they have and excited about improving on that. They know that not all days are going to go well and not all results are going to come in as they would like, and they take that in their stride. Because for them, the overall trend is always up.
8. You are always learning
   Every experience is an opportunity for a salesperson with a great attitude to learn something new. There is no such thing as knowing it all, and everyone has the ability to teach something. Salespeople with a great attitude are like sponges, absorbing everything they can that may have an impact in making them constantly that little bit better. Over time, they are the ones that are referred to as experts.
9. You know it is also about giving
   “What can the company do for me?” is only part of the question for a salesperson with a great attitude. Sure, you want to work for a company that invests in its people, that has great products and that pays well. But salespeople with a great attitude know it is a two-way street and that the company has a right to expect as much from you as it gives to you. Your loyalty, focus, innovation and hard work are not ‘nice to haves', they are ‘must haves'.
10. You invest for the future
    Salespeople with a great attitude know that no matter where the future takes them in terms of company, career level or even country, they will always be at the top of their game if they invest in themselves. They take training seriously and invest their time in that. They build, maintain and nurture relationships to ensure future business, and they work hard at deserving a reputation for honesty, integrity, service and support and lots of personal attention.

Ten key risks of a lousy attitude

1. You handle rejection poorly
   To a salesperson with a lousy attitude, customers who don't buy are idiots and jerks who don't know a good deal when they see one. Their focus on blame, criticism, complaining and the other hallmarks of defeatism becomes a vicious spiral and they never really get beyond it.
2. You give up easily
   A salesperson with a lousy attitude regards everyone with suspicion and reads nuances into their activities which are often simply not there. If a prospect doesn't call them back after three messages have been left, salespeople with a lousy attitude tend to drop them as dead ends. The fact that they haven't actually spoken to the prospect and therefore don't know if the answer is really ‘No' or whether the prospect is simply holidaying in Mauritius this week, isn't something they tend to consider as they strike them off the list. The result: salespeople with a lousy attitude have a very low conversion rate.
3. You are afraid of people
   Salespeople with a poor attitude imagine - and therefore generally get - a bad reaction from prospects, largely because they fail to accept they have a great product, made by a great company, which customers all over the country have already bought. They imagine that they will be regarded as an annoying salesperson and their actions and lousy attitude tend to make that view self-fulfilling.
4. People regard you as a salesperson
   When faced with a salesperson who is processing them, going through the motions and only pretending to listen, people tend to start backing away. When faced with a salesperson who has a great idea, understands how it can fit and what it will do for them, and treats them with intelligence and respect, people tend to stay and listen. Interestingly, in the aftermath, only one of those people would be described as a salesperson. The other quickly becomes “My insurance guy” or “Our office automation woman.”
   No prizes for guessing which one actually gets the business.
5. You are all over the place
   Salespeople with a lousy attitude often fail to recognise that sales is a game of planning, assigning blocks of time to often undesirable tasks (cold calling!!!) and admin. Getting those things right and doing them methodically opens up literally swathes of structured time to get out and sell. Salespeople with a lousy attitude tend to regard these important functions as a drain on their time, even though - and directly as a result - they tend to spend their days and weeks in an unstructured mess.
6. You sandbag or sugar coat everything
   The results predicted by salespeople with a lousy attitude are usually not worth much because they are not based on very valid data. Such salespeople predict victory with every positive customer encounter (whether serious business has been discussed or not) or are always decrying the difficult state of the market (even though everyone around them faces the same reality). As a result, their sales leaders regard such salespeople with frustration and disinterest.
7. Your energy is generally low
   Salespeople with a lousy attitude are more likely to be the ones that have a traffic excuse in the morning, or to be the ones at The Keg on a Friday afternoon rather than on the road. They regard the freedom that sales affords as an opportunity to duck out early rather than as an opportunity to decide who they will call upon and when. They direct more energy towards work avoidance than work excellence.
8. You never improve
   Salespeople with a lousy attitude think that sales is easy. They go through the motions of whatever it is that has worked for them in the past, and all the while the buying public is moving beyond them, becoming more sophisticated and less prone to the sales pitches they hear out of such salespeople. Such salespeople are precisely like those guys you went to school with who, 10 years later, are still hanging out in the same places, having the same conversations and even dressing the same. All you want to do is avoid them.
9. You focus on what is in it for you
   If the company doesn't pay for training, the salesperson with a lousy attitude just won't go. Such salespeople rarely take the view that ultimately they are the ones who will benefit from the training and focus only on how it will benefit the company. In their thinking, if the company benefits, the company should pay. It is a slave mentality which leaves little room for independence and it is the hallmark of a loser.
10. You think you know it all
    The guys and girls who walk out of a training session or sales seminar and say declare that there was nothing new to be learned, are generally the ones who are doing worst at sales. Their lousy attitude means they have a block against learning new ideas and as a consequence, they never get to the top of the table no matter where they are selling.

Your life is on Pay as You Go. Are you wasting precious minutes? Anyone whose cell phone contract is Pay as You Go will know that if they waste time, they will soon be out of it. Literally. You can top up whenever you want of course, but unlike contract customers who can spend their call time whenever and however they want, without consequence (save for a big bill), Pay as You Go customers know that every minute - in fact, every second - counts. Sales time is a lot like Pay as You Go; with the exception that you cannot in fact just top up whenever you would like to. Like Pay as You Go customers, salespeople need to treat all their time as a valuable commodity. Salespeople with a great attitude know that time wasted is time that cannot come back. They are the ultimate Pay as You Go experts. And as a consequence, they get great value from their time, all the time.

Visit our PRESS OFFICE: SALESGURU is the only magazine in South Africa today that is focused purely on the subject of selling. It's a hands-on learning tool for all aspiring sales professionals.- more....

[5 Aug 2008 11:16]

SEND TO A FRIEND  |   PRINT