What is your Motivation to sales? In this changing world you really need to ramp up and be noticed or sink in the muddy waters of failure.
Failure is as easy to achieve as success,it just takes more work.
Life is not fair it needs consistent input to make a difference. This is not about your position in life, your skin colour, your physical abilities, your sex or even your age. This is about you.
We all have opportunities the difference is whether we take them or not.
I was recently watching the Netflix series The Final Dance. This is a story of Michael Jordan and his rise to be arguably the best basket player ever.
His upbringing was probably a little better than some players in the team however he started from the bottom rung like all the others.
Jordan did have height and some athletic ability but most of all he had ambition.
He was at the ring before the others and back when they had left. His attitude was to win, there was no second place and he would throw everything at it.
An interesting aside he famously said ” I have missed more baskets than I have shot and lost more games than I have won.”
He had huge success but it was beset with many failures that he needed to rise above.
That's a bit like us all, no one wins every race but we come back and make sure we win enough.
How to gain this success for yourself
First of all what right have I to lecture you on gaining a winning formula? I am no psych but I do have a 50 year career in business.
I am mid seventies and still working and writing about it.
Why? because I want another final dance before I hang up my boots.
It is now an interesting world where anyone can rise above the normal and become successful.
J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series from a coffee shop to use the free internet service.
She was rejected by publishers and ended as rich as anyone because of a vision and persistence.
Motivation to sales starts with a vision.
It all starts with a vision
Knowing where you are going is pretty important. It may be to increase your sales by 20% by date and how you will do it.
Being realistic helps here. You can't be a doctor without seven years of toil, or a pro footballer
without achieving in the little league.
You won't outsell Google and it took Facebook five years to make a dime.
JK Rowling took six years to write the first book and Napoleon Hill took twenty years to write Think and Grow Rich.
Therefore you should think Marathon before sprint.
It must be written
A plan is a written document that details the journey to your destination. It is documented and sealed in blood (almost). It will be looked at everyday and the plan dissected.
If you imagine meeting your goals they will happen. This is not Voodoo stuff although many believe this to be true.
However you will make the changes and do the things that will walk you to the finish line.
It starts with doing something
We all have 24 hours in the day and those hours need to have a whole bundle of activity set aside to work on your vision.
You can't catch up on what you miss. When you do yesterday, today then tomorrow is yesterday in a spiral of activity going down.
Remember it does matter and it has a cumulative effect that extends your timeline to finish the project.
Working in energy sprints
This has a lot of names but what we are saying is designate a period of time, say a half hour, and put all your focus into the project for that time.
No emails, phone calls diversions just absolute focus on achieving as much in half an hour as you can.
The time may be longer however peak at an hour before you jump up and feel the euphoria.
When I am writing I set a word count and timer so that I can judge my results, this is particularly so when it is hard to sit and concentrate.
We all get those times when avoiding action is preferable to doing things.
If you say “what the heck, 30 minutes never hurt anyone” and give it ago it will break the ice. If not you have at least achieved a block of concentrated effort towards your goal.
When sales are the goal then ways are the answer.
There are hundreds of ways to get more sales and I documented this recently in a post about how to improve my business. Here I listed about fifty sure fire methods that with even a small result will provide a very large cumulative effort.
It is sometimes referred to as the 10x effect. Take10 ideas and increase them by 10% to get ten times the result. It is easy to do and works wonders. However it needs to be done and done by you and that is the source of the problem.
Motivation to sales is hard when you are busy.
The too busy conflict leads to a black hole
We all have busy days, however busy is not what we want unless it is putting cash in the till.
When you are too busy to do marketing you will end up being too busy worrying about the business.
It may just be too late when your customers have drifted off to greener pastures because you failed to be constantly in their face. It is cheaper to keep a customer than to buy a new one.
I have been reading a post by a mate Alex Evans. Alex was giving the case of Coca Cola the worlds largest seller of soft drink. Do you still see them advertising? Of course everyday on prime time TV because they want to stay on top.
Be dammed Pepsi and other posers you are never going to usurp our brand,
For 128 years they have remained the top dog and don't look like retiring the position.
However it is interesting that they have made some colossal mistakes along the way but returned to what they do best, flogging sugar drinks, who would have thought.
MC Donald's is another, they stay consistently on brand and in your face forever growing with junk food that no one should eat. However they continue to achieve because of marketing.
Motivation to sales and foreseeable decline
The famous bell curve and you
The 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray was adapted by marketers adopting the principal of peak performance.
This is typically what happens in small business. You get too busy to market when sales are good and the hill is but a block away.
Coke sales don't decline, Mc Donald's keep opening stores, supermarkets compete for customers all through a consistent pattern of marketing.
If you don't want Pepsi to run past you then never give a sucker an even break and market them out of the water.
Motivation to sales and your solution.
What is your marketing solution?
Please note I say your marketing solution, not mine, the problem purely rests with you.
My saying is always “Do nothing and get the same” often offensive but always true.
Therefore you want to 10X your business by increasing ten ways to market by just 10% and make it a consistent habit.
Get staff to support the vision, employ outside help or even use a labour hire like Fivvr to have it done automatically.
The truth is that it must be done or you will be running down hill quicker than your feet can go.
Every business is different so I wrote some creative ways to look at things in a recent post that may give you a few ideas to grow your business to where you want to be.
If you lack a bit of experience and want some training on all the basics, there is no better than starting at the free version of Wealthy Affiliate. It is where I gathered more information in a few months than a few years prior as I wandered through course after course.
Conclusion
The end of my rant or my final words to get you motivated to get off your backside and enjoy the adventure.
There is no better high than success, knowing that you have achieved a goal that you planned and initiated.
We all make mistakes however they are just part of the learning experience and they get you to focus more on what does work and less on what did not.
Even Coke had the NEW COKE disaster as it tried to head off a challenge by Pepsi. They went back to basics and charged ahead and you can too.
About
Motivation to sales by Peter Hanley
You may also like my posts on client surveys “make or break”
