Success is not final [Nor is failure fatal]

I want to give you a couple inspirational quotes to think about over the weekend. 

First, from Winston Churchill... 

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” 

This says it all about the challenges of being in sales. 

It doesn’t matter how well you do this month. Or this year. The meter is reset to Zero next month. Or next year. And, you have to do it all over again. 

Except the definition of success will have changed going forward. 

It will require you to be smarter, better, faster just to stay at the level you're at now. Let alone meet raised expectations. 

And, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, you will encounter failure in sales. No one can win them all. 

It’s what you do in the face of that failure that matters. 

Do you learn from your failures? More importantly, do you learn from your successes? 

Do you take the risk to invest your time, effort and money in your future success? To become the Best Version of You (BVOY)? 

Or do you play it safe? Satisfied with what you have? 

To me, this is where the courage enters the equation. 

When you’ve experienced success, what are you prepared to risk to ensure that you continue to succeed? 

Which leads to my second quote. It’s one of my favorites. From Italian playwright Guiseppe Lampedusa... 

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” 

It doesn’t matter how good you are today, the world around you is rapidly changing. You have to change with it. 

The challenge for you is that just to maintain the level of success you enjoy today, you have to become even better tomorrow. 

Let’s say you achieved 100% of quota this year. Well, that 100% may be only 90% of quota next year. 

That’s nearly a 12% increase. So, if you want to stay at 100% of quota next year, what steps are you going to take, what changes are you going to make, to enable you to become 12% more productive? 

It can’t all be just about working harder. 

If you want to achieve at a higher level in the future than you do today, you’ll have to invest even more of your time, effort and money (or is it blood, sweat and tears?) in your personal development. 

As the legendary business thinker Jim Rohn put it... 

“Income seldom exceeds personal development.” 

Do you want to earn more? 

Then you need to learn more. 

To your greater success,

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 sales.