Episode #164: Leading An Intentional Sales Professional Life In 2020

The targets for the year are already set or will be set shortly, no matter when your financial year begins. These numbers are irrelevant. What is more important is what you are going to do to improve yourself this year to make hitting those targets more certain and easier to do. We tend to roll one year into the next without any interventions to recalibrate what we are doing and why we are doing it. Habits are good and bad and bad habits are the enemy of progress. Let’s ditch those in 2020. Here are some things to work on for the new year coming up.

1. Decide you will become a professional. Sales is the refuge of failures from other jobs. They lose their current job and because companies are always in need of more salespeople, they find themselves in a sales job. Naturally they get no training, so the job is horrible. Was this you? Before you know it, you have fallen into a victim mentality and it can be hard to break free from the chains of low esteem and low self confidence.

Study about sales and communication. If you can’t read, then listen to audio or watch videos – there is so much free content marketing pieces available out there today it is unbelievable. Get yourself on a sales training course and even if you have to borrow money to go on that course, do it, because the investment will repay you a hundred fold and more. Naturally I recommend a Dale Carnegie sales course for you, but at least get training. The difference is night and day and so is the money flow which comes back to you as a result.

2. Get your “kokorogame” right. I wrote about this in my book Japan Sales Mastery and we can translate the term from Japanese to mean “true intention”. In the martial arts we meditate before commencing hostilities, in flower arranging the master strips the flower stems, in shodo the calligraphy expert rubs the ink stone to produce the ink. These are all done with the same aim, to get our mind in the right frame for the activity we are about to undertake. Sales is the same. Why are we selling? Is it to make ourselves money or make the client money? That is a fundamental question. The answer sets off a chain reaction of further decisions and actions, which totally define whether we are professionals or transients in the world of selling.

3. Decide to control the sale conversation. In Japan, in 99% of cases, the buyer controls the sales conversation and this is just ridiculous. The salesperson’s job is to help the buyer make the best decision to advance their business. Why do we leave it to the client to self-service? No!

This only happens when the salesperson is inadequate and untrained. Instead we need to ask questions of the buyer to find our A. do we have what they need and B. if we do have it, then present the solution in a way that the client thinks, “fantastic – this is just what we need”.

In Japan we will be dragged into the mud and the blood of giving our pitch by the buyer unless we get their permission to ask them questions. Japanese salespeople are pitchpeople not salespeople. How on earth do you know what the client needs unless you ask them questions first? Well you don’t, but in this culture the buyer is God and God demands the pitch, unless the salesperson intervenes and redirects the conversation. Once you have permission to ask questions, life gets good and you will get sales. Pitching is a very tenuous way of striking it lucky and happen to chance upon what the buyer wants. This is basically the stupid way of doing things, so don’t do it.

There are many things to work on in selling in 2020, but if you can only concentrate on these three things then you will become a much more professional and skillful salesperson. Attitude and skill are the basic building blocks on top of which we pour on the product knowledge.