Are you a "sales person" or "life long student of sales?"

How are you disrupting the sales status quo? How are you challenging it in your day to day selling?

Why is this important? 

I believe that an individual’s ability to anticipate change is decisive to their ability to achieve their personal and career goals in both the short and long term. While it’s important to be able to adapt to change, I believe that if you want to achieve consistent, long-term success in sales then you have to become the initiator of change. 

This means you have to change how you learn, how you behave and how you envision success for yourself. You can’t wait and become a follower. Followers get squeezed.

For instance, no one can dispute the impact technology has had in disrupting how we communicate and conduct business. Yet, I find it ironic how the disruptive power of technology is being used is to demand greater conformity from its users.

This particularly appears to be happening in sales.

You get trained to a specific sales methodology. You get haltered to a process-based metric that is driven by the technology you use. Then managers use spurious data correlations generated from the technology you use to insist that you talk this way and write that way. 

Seemingly the goal appears to be to turn all sales reps into robotic clones of some idealized version of a “top” sales person that will reliably execute an unchanging sales process on buyers that will all respond in the exact same manner.

Which is the absolute wrong approach and one that you should resist at all turns.
You are your own person. The most effective version of you is not as a “ninja” of some sales methodology but as the black belt of selling like you. 

Your buyers don’t want to talk with a drone or a clone. Your customers want you to sell like you.They don’t want to invest time in the typical confident incompetent who just mimics how he or she thinks sales professionals are supposed to act. Buyers want to invest their time in sales professionals who are ready to be relevant to the goals they are trying to achieve.

So, how do you disrupt your selling?

Start by making the commitment to being a learner.Your self identification should change from being a "sales person" to “lifelong student of sales.” 

Then back it up by being curious and continuously learning about your profession, your products, your customers. 

• Read, listen, watch. 
• Learning 10 minutes a day would be a great start.
• Commit to investing just 10 minutes everyday to learn something new about sales.
• Read 10 minutes in a sales book. A chapter.
• Read one blog article on sales. Everyday.
• Listen to the first 10 minutes of a podcast.
• Or watch a 3 minute sales video on YouTube.
• And do it everyday. 10 minutes. Let’s start there.

Not every bit of information you consume will be useful to you. That’s the way it should be. Part of your learning curve involves determining what you can use and put to productive use in your personal sales method.

With the investment of as little as 10 minutes per day you will stay ahead of the change curve. You will become proactive in anticipation of change instead of reactive to changes that others insist you make.

In other words, you’ll disrupt your own selling to stay ready and relevant to your buyers. 

Good selling,

Peter C. Mclees, Sales Coach and Trainer
Smart Development
petercmclees@gmail.com
Mobile: 323-854-1713

We help sales reps and sales organizations accelerate their development and as a result their sales.

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