It’s the mantra of almost every top Southwestern salesperson out there. We’ve all been told that to reach our goals, we can’t make any excuses—we have to be unconditionally committed. But I AM unconditionally committed, you say. I don’t make excuses, but I still haven’t reached my goals. What gives? The answer is pretty simple: human beings are far too reasonable.

                Let me give you an example: let’s say you’re a student in the Southwestern Advantage summer program, and you have a goal of hitting President’s Club in personal sales. It’s 9:36 on Saturday night, and you’re one sale away from reaching your goal, but you have no good prospects in your area who have lights on. In fact, the closest prospect lives a ten-minute drive away, and they might not be up, either. After all, you didn’t set up an appointment with them. What do you do? The reasonable Southwestern salesperson looks at their watch and calls it a day. They didn’t hit their goal, but they had a good reason for not hitting it. I don’t want to make these people mad at me! That could give me really bad PR, and I might get kicked out of my turf. And they’ll probably buy if I stop in at a better time, but there’s no way they’ll buy if I wake them up. What else can I do? And they rationalize away their failure to hit their goal.

                That, my friends, it what it means to be reasonable. It means granting a good reason for failure permission to be a suitable substitute for success. Being reasonable is the number one cause of our failure to reach our true potential in work and in life.

                And there is a cure. But like most cures, it’s not pleasant—it’s not comfortable. If we really want to succeed, we must embrace the concept of being UNreasonable. To be UNreasonable is to refuse to let a good reason for failure prevent us from achieving success.

                So looking at our previous Southwestern example, we saw that the reasonable thing to do is to end the week, failing to hit our goal. What’s the UNreasonable course of action? Well, this is where it gets fun! There are lots of UNreasonable things we can do. One is to go knock on a dark door.  Another is to drive to that next prospect ten minutes away. They may not be up, but maybe their neighbors are. We could go to a new area of our Southwestern sales locality and find a family who’s awake. What about going to a convenience store and selling a set of books to the clerk on night shift? Or, we could plan ahead and make sure we have lots of late night appointments, so there’s always someone to go talk to after dark (the best choice!) The possibilities are endless!

                If you ever find yourself caught in a situation where the only way out seems to be reasonable, check yourself. Is the reason really valid? Are there any UNreasonable solutions you could try? And don’t forget to fall back on your emotional purpose: is the reason for failing to hit your goal really bigger than your desire to make your purpose a reality? If it’s not, then it’s time to get UNreasonable.

So it is with selling.  Your encounters, your closing victories, your frustrations, your close misses—all are subject to your own internal voice.  The voice which is always evaluating, judging, and commenting as you go through your day.  My first summer with Southwestern, I constantly found myself at the mercy of my own thoughts, so I eventually figured out that I could divide my thoughts into two categories:

Useful thoughts and Useless thoughts. 

I discovered my natural negativity.   Left to myself, my internal dialogue as a rookie with Southwestern was not uplifting:

“Do I like this?”  No.

“Am I good at selling?”  Not really.

“Do people out here like me?”  Apparently not.   Or better yet:

“I suck at selling.  This is not fun.  People out here are idiots….”

And so it went.  Consciously, I had to  replace useless thoughts and negative internal conversations with more helpful stuff, like:

“I can, I will, and I’m going to do well with Southwestern.”

“Something about today will help me 5 years from now.”

“Progress, not perfection.”

“This situation will make a great story someday…”.

“I will laugh about this one day, so why not laugh now?”

I had to say positive affirmations out loud or my mind would gravitate to the dark side.  I found by saying positive phrases aloud, my mind would paint a useful picture.  I would visualize what I wanted to happen rather than wallowing in negative images and thoughts.

Southwestern strategy for winning in sales: Entertain only those thoughts which build you up; trash the rest.

What thoughts help you feel confident?  What thoughts drain you?  You must control that 6″ terrain between your ears!  If this is your first summer with Southwestern, why not begin to monitor your thoughts?  Pretend to hook up a digital recorder to your brain, and begin to notice your recurring thoughts.  Are they useful or useless?  Do they build your confidence, or do your thoughts tear you down?  I welcome your comments—if you’re selling with Southwestern, share your best, most helpful thoughts/affirmations.

“Goals. We all make them to start the new year. And forget them by Valentine’s Day.

“So here’s your excuse to stop working on your Personal Goals for 2011 right this moment. The reason: They might make you a less effective leader.

“The fact of the matter is that personal goals can come at the expense of something more important: making others around you better by making them your priority. That’s the word from Harvard Business School professors Robin Ely and Frances Frei, and Anne Morriss of Concire Leadership Institute.

‘That doesn’t mean leaders are selfless. They have personal goals — to build status, a professional identity, and a retirement plan, among other things,” the authors write in the current Harvard Business Review. “But the narrow pursuit of those goals can lead to self-protection and self-promotion, neither of which fosters other people’s success.’

“This may be one of the hardest things you will do as a leader. After all, self-protection is the ultimate brain hard-wire. So to downplay our own needs can feel dangerous, according to Ely, Frei and Morriss in their article, Stop Holding Yourself Back.

‘But all breakthrough leaders find ways to tame their security impulses. Most are amazed by the energy and meaning they discover when they no longer define themselves by their personal needs and fears.’

“OK, so you should have at least one personal goal this year: Make others better. Your commitment should be to make another person, or your entire team, better in some way. At problem solving, or prioritizing, or communicating with customers. Then get them the resources they need to get to work.”

What do you think about Silverthorne’s other-centered goal setting idea?  I welcome your thoughts.

To the point of this post: I ran across a bNEt blog which agrees with Pink’s findings.  Click on this link:  http://www.bnet.com/blog/salesmachine/why-sales-goals-and-diets-dont-work/11650?promo=808&tag=nl.e808

If you are a sales manager, a VP of sales, an artist, a business owner or someone who is just trying to lose weight, it would be wise to read and ponder Pink’s latest book.  The old “carrot and stick” mentality regarding contests, work, compensation and motivation needs an overhaul.

Here is Pink describing this Drive thesis at a TED conference.  Click here.

Thoughts?

Is There Life before Death?

 
Often people don’t pay much attention to the words they use to describe themselves, and the consequences and ramifications of using these words. For instance, people who have had horrible experiences–particularly in early childhood–often describe themselves as “scarred for life.”

In the first place, they are engaged in fortune-telling without being qualified:  No one can predict the future that well.  Some people continue to suffer from traumatic experiences into their later years, but many others don’t.  Secondly, they don’t examine the meanings of the words they use. Most people go “Oh, ‘scarred for life,’ Yes, terrible!” without thinking about what the words actually mean. I have quite a few scars, and none of them bother me a bit. Scar tissue is often considerably tougher than the original. Only a few scars continue to produce discomfort, and even then the discomfort is more often due to damage that never fully healed, than to the scar tissue itself. Scarring is actually a sign that the body healed itself and made itself whole again.

Even the meaning of obvious scars depends on how they are viewed. Early in this century in Germany, a visible dueling scar was considered a badge of honor. When I was in high school in New Mexico in the 1950′s, many students flaunted their knife scars as a sign of bravery. Some African tribes deliberately create elaborate decorations on their skins by scarring. I have even met quite a few women with scars that made their faces much more interesting than they would have been without them.  So what does “scarred for life” really mean?–only what you choose it to mean.

So what words do you use to describe your week?  Here’s what I’ve heard at Southwestern Sunday meetings:

“It’s horrible.” 
“I’m dying out here.” 
“I’m got slaughtered this week!”

Are these descriptors really that accurate? 

One sharp, bubbly Student Manager I met with even had her own nickname: DRAMA.  She got this moniker because she said she took little things and made them complicated and complex.  She overthought and consequently everything became a big deal!  Second-guessing herself felt natural–her life was “always a drama”! 

Cute and memorable?  Yes.  Helpful?  No.

The metaphors and images–even our nicknames–have a way of steering our thinking and our lives. It’s wise to be cautious about the ones we use, and it’s wise to examine them to see if they are taking us where we really want to go.

What words, thoughts and comments does this invoke?  How do you label your experiences?  Let me know.

1)  wish you were somewhere else, doing something else

In other words, avoid being present!  Let your mind drift off to home, to greener pastures, to more pleasant activities.  (Remember sitting in the classroom back at school, gazing out the window, and not paying attention to what was happening in the lecture?)

2)  ponder your defeats

It’s easy to catch yourself doing something wrong.  We all tend to dwell on our misteaks (I know, I was just testing you).  What’s far more difficult is to notice your victories and what you’ve done well that day.

3)  get really satisfied with your production

My first summer selling with the Southwestern Company, I did well–for the first 90% of the summer.  Then I had a rather destructive thought.  It was, “Wow. I’ve made three times more money than I made last summer.”  I suddenly felt rich.  My drive, my competitive nature, my interest–all flagged.  And my last two weeks selling that summer were in survival mode.  “Satisfied-itis” had set in.

4)  compare yourself to top salespeople

In order to really feel less than adequate, use phrases like: “If only I could sell like _______ ,” or “Why can’t I sell like ______?”  If you ask a bad question, your brain will provide a bad answer.  Remember, you are not your units.  You are not your production.

5)  tell yourself you suck at sales

It’s impossible to perform well while at the same time reminding yourself how bad you are at the task.  Imagine the result if your self-talk about driving was, “I am a bad driver.  I just have wrecks.  Accidents happen to me all the time.  Man, I can’t drive.”  Then you start the ignition.  Change your self-talk!  You want the right kind of self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to your sales.

Do you have more strategies to fail?  Feel free to comment–just avoid the suggestions!

Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach who brought the Green Bay Packers from 15 losing seasons to successive Super Bowl championships, that success was a matter of inches.  A bit more focus, one extra push in practice, second effort for a tiny additional gain.  He didn’t ask his players to be something other than what they were–he asked them to improve their best one inch at a time.  He knew inches add up, both in life and in a sales career.

At Southwestern, we call it the slight edge philosophy–all the little extras top salespeople do to gain a slight edge on the competition: working when you don’t feel like it, making a call beyond the suggested schedule, closing one more time, taking time to memorize your customers’ names, repeating positive affirmations out loud, reading technical material at night after work.

Question: are you doing all those little things you used to do when you were excited about your work?  Are you working with the same focus and enthusiasm as you did the first week?  These little things–these “inches”–separate top sales people from average producers. 

Today, I will be aware that I am a champion in the making.  I may not make a complete turnaround in one day, but I will make progress.

I think it might be physically impossible to have a bad day after a morning like that.

While not always a common practice, many successful people engage in similar affirmation rituals every single day. 

What exactly are affirmations, you ask?  Well, we all affirm ourselves constantly.  For better, or for worse.  Our affirmations are the stream of dialogue that flows through our brains each and every day.  They are the thoughts we have about ourselves, our abilities, our expectations, and others.  They are also in the words we speak and the actions we take on a daily basis.  This flow of information is our output into the world.  It affirms that our belief systems (the way we view the world, ourselves, and other people) … are indeed true.   These affirmations are, in effect, programming our brains.

So it is our decision whether our affirmations are positive – or negative.  They can tell us how happy and at-ease we are (or, how much we like our pajamas).  Alternatively, they can tell us that people are cruel and life is hard and we were intended to live a life of suffering.

And just like when you program a computer – what you put into it, is what you get out of it.  Garbage in; garbage out, as they say.  Same goes for how we communicate with ourselves.  We actually TELL ourselves and those around us what we want out of life. How we want to feel, what we want to experience, who we want to surround ourselves with, etc.  It’s amazing how much of our reality is actually up to us.

And yes, it may seem (or look) silly to a bystander,  but I’d be willing to bet that if we all started our days a little more like Jessica – in some capacity or other - we’d see our lives (and our summer’s) get a whole lot more fruitful. 

Focus.  What do you focus on?  This blog seemed to tie in to Valentine’s Day coming up, so…

How can you fall out of love with your job?  At Southwestern, you can notice how few people say yes, on the heat, on random negative thoughts, on how you dislike the feeling of failure, on the weight of your bookbag.  If this is what you notice–what you give your attention to–soon, you will be falling out of love with your sales job.

Now to your significant other.  Remember all the habits that you once found cute, or overlooked?  His inability to ask for directions, his talking with his mouth full, his leaving his dirty clothes all over the floor?  Early on in your relationship, you overlooked these foibles and concentrated on what you loved about him.  You were noticing his strengths and ignoring his weaknesses.  (You could fix those up later, right?)

Now, what you ignored you notice–all those habits become irritations.  The crumbs on the counter, never replacing the toilet paper roll, all the time he spends with his friends…what a schmuck!  (How did I ever like him?)  You are  noticing what you don’t like.  You will fall out of love at some point and may not know why! 

So, since this is a sales blog and not eHarmony, it might be time to refocus your focus–in other words, if you’re tired of your sales career, you may want to notice what you’re noticing.  You may need to decide to be grateful.

Here are a few good questions to ask yourself at the end of the day:

• What have I given today?  (not gotten, given)
• What have I learned today?  (people who are learning are liking what they do)
• How has today been an investment for my future?  (not just a day closer to the weekend)
• What do I love about what I do?

After you have been in a love relationship or a career for awhile, the shiny newness tends to wear off.  When it does–and it will–you have to be deliberate in your focus.  You have to affirm what you want, consciously.  Left to my own devices, my mind automatically drifts into negativity.  It’s far easier for me to notice what’s wrong than what’s right.  Are you like this?  I have to consciously make an effort.  At times, I have to notice what I like/love about my job–and my wife.  I’m sure she has to do the same. 

 A sales career, a loving relationship–both take energy and investment to work over the long haul.  Action point: Send your sales opportunity some flowers or a nice box of chocolates.  It deserves it.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.  What are your strategies to stay in love with what you do?

When you’re selling, the same little truth applies.  You have to be present to win.  I’ve seen salespeople who are physically present with the client, but it’s obvious that their head is somewhere else.  They are mentally reliving some sales or personal experience in the past, or they are fretting about future calls. 

I remember many Southwestern Company Sunday meetings I went to.  I rarely enjoyed my day off.  Why?  I was not present.  I was either feeling bad about the week that was over (guilt), or I was anticipating the next week of sales (worry).  It was therefore tough to relax and enjoy the day off…Sundays were merely a countdown until the next week of pressure.

 So how do you sell “in the moment”?  How can you be present with your clients? 

1. Control your self-talk. Remind yourself there’s nothing you can do to alter the past. What’s done is done. Remind your mind that the most important person is your client-focus in on their needs. “It’s hard to be nervous when your mind’s on service.” 

2. Be with people; get in a demonstration! Sitting around “getting organized” or being paralyzed by inaction can multiply your fears. Get in front of a client-make the call. Talking with a customer will help you focus. 

3. “Breathe & Focus”-one of my favorite thoughts from the book, Mind Gym. Author Gary Mack trains top athletes to stay in the moment. “Whenever they feel themselves growing anxious, breathe in energy, breathe out negativity. Breathe in relaxation. Breathe out stress.” 

What ideas do you have to stay “present”?  We all want to win; the challenge is to be where you are.  Share your thoughts.