Happy New Sales Year!
This is the first Monday of the year. The slate is clean. The opportunity to excel, to level up, to make this your best year ever is yours for the taking. The world is your oyster.
It’s time to shake off distractions, get focused, and execute. As we look forward to the next twelve months, there are only three things you control. Your actions, reactions, and mindset.
Actions
You have absolute control over your actions. These are the choices you make about email data how you spend your time, what you prioritize, and where you focus. Choose the right actions and you are going to have a great year; the wrong actions, not so much.
And when it comes to choosing how and on what you invest your time, commit to being ruthless about what you prioritize.Do the things that have the greatest impact on revenue generation, hitting your sales numbers, and achieving your personal goals.
Reactions
You have control over how you react and respond to the many challenges you will face over the next twelve months. And trust me, there will be lots of challenges and roadblocks.
One of those challenges will be dealing with all of the people and distractions that steal your time and pull your attention away from your priorities.
It will take discipline to respond to these things with a polite no and stay on course. Remember that discipline is sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. Therefore, you can better manage your responses by keeping your eyes on the prize.
Leverage Mindfulness
When you face emotionally challenging situations, one way to manage your reactions is through mindfulness.
I always thought mindfulness was some frou frou yoga crap until a learned what it really means and how especially powerful it is for managing emotional reactions when you face conflict with another person. Which is important because sales is full of conflict.
Mindfulness is simply the gap you leave between something happening to you and when you respond to it. In this gap you have the opportunity to exert control over your emotions and response. And let’s be clear: you have complete control of when you respond, how you respond, and if you respond.
The way I activate mindfulness is through a simple mental exercise in which I answer the question: Do I want this or do I want that?
For example, if I get into an argument with my wife and my emotional reaction is to dig in and fight for my point of view, before I do, I’ll ask myself: Do I want to be happy or do I want to be right?
If you are dealing with a tough customer who is pushing your buttons and you really want to give them your mind, you might stop and ask yourself “Do I want to hit my sales number or do I want to tell this jerk what I think about them?
Mindset
And finally, you control your mindset – your attitudes and beliefs. Of the three things you control, mindset is the most important.
Sales is a mental game. It is a truth that 90% of your success is going to be determined by what goes on between your ears.
There are two prevailing mindsets among salespeople in the world today. My good friend and co-author of The AI Edge Anthony Iannarino labels these the rain barrel mindset and the rainmaker mindset.
Rain Barrel Salespeople
Think for a moment about a rain barrel. What does it do? The rain barrel sits in the backyard rusting waiting for rain.
This is exactly what rain barrel salespeople do. They sit around waiting for something organizing a search on a website: choosing between bitrix, sphinx and elasticsearch to happen to them. Hoping for a lead to come their way. Waiting for their prospect to do the work and close the sale themselves.
Rain Barrels are defined by their circumstances. They complain and whine but take no action to change them. When it doesn’t rain, they blame everything and everyone except for themselves. The rain barrel resides in mediocrity and never reaches their potential.
Rainmakers
Then there is the rainmaker mindset. Rain makers believe in themselves and their ability to make things happen. They don’t wait around for anyone or anything.
They replace hope with action. They win and achieve no matter what the circumstances because they believe at the core that they control their destiny. In sales, rain makers are the apex predators who sell more, earn more, and win more.
Manage Your Self-Talk
But here’s the deal. All day long there is a little voice inside your head that is jabbering away. That voice is either building you up or breaking you down.
Allowed to run unfettered, it tells you that you are not good enough, that the world is against you, that you should just give up and quit. Why work hard and give your best effort when the competition, prospects, boss, economy, internal team are all against you it says.
Negative self-talk will sap your confidence and energy. It will cause you to take short cuts, the easy way out, and give up too soon. It will turn you into a cynical pessimist and steal your joy.
Therefore, you must vigilantly monitor and manage your self-talk and have aero leads the intentional discipline to stop and turn it around when it goes negative. Otherwise it’s easy to slip into mediocrity and become a rain barrel.
So on this first monday of the year which mindset will you adopt? What will be your identity?
Will you be a rain barrel and hope for the best? Or, will you become a rainmaker and be your best?
