Sales people love to talk. Sales people love to talk about selling. Get a few sales people together, they exchange war stories, whine, talk about successes, share ideas. Sales people will talk about their customers, they’ll talk about their territories, they will talk about what they want to do. They will strategize about different approaches, how to get the order. The list goes on, sales people love to talk.
Lots of people are enamored with the concept of selling. Meeting with customers, talking about their products, the psychic rewards of winning a deal, the financial rewards of winning deals.
But then it comes to doing the work.
Everything changes. Start talking about doing the work, a room of sales people will go silent. How many calls did you make today? How many meetings do you have scheduled this week? How many deals are you working right now, when will the close?
Results don’t happen unless you do the work.
Too many talk about the work. Too few do the work.
Doing the work is tedious. It’s figuring out why a customer might want to talk to you. It’s figuring out how to catch the customer’s interest. It’s having the courage to pick up the phone and reaching out. Then dialing again, and again. It’s going back, after the customer has tossed you and insurmountable challenge and getting the customer to have a different perspective. It’s about doing the work–sharply, in a focused manner, creating value in every call, persevering in the face of obstacles. It’s picking yourself up after you’ve been kicked in the teeth, figuring out what you might do better and going back. It’s about knowing that if you don’t make those 25, 50, 100 or whatever calls you need to make today and not letting anything deter you from making the calls.
Being a sales professional is about doing the work, not talking about it.
Where do you fall?
