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Still Waiting For The Economy To Turn Around?

By Will Turner

I’ve heard business owners and salespeople lament about the sluggish economy and how they can’t wait for a turnaround. Their expectation is that once things pick up, business will follow. With that kind of expectation, they’ll be lucky to survive.

You see, in any economy, there are winners and losers. The difference is that winners take the hand that is dealt them and do something about it. Kelly, one of my clients, recently shared with me that her sales have gone up 361% in the past year. And that’s in a “down economy.” In addition, in the first four months of this year, she has already doubled her sales for all of last year.

So how did she do it? The answer is that she made a number of changes. Let’s look at a few of them.

Being Open To Change - Even though Kelly was a seasoned sales pro, she realized that she wasn’t where she wanted to be. Her employer was happy with her performance; in fact, she was the top producer for her organization. Kelly, however, knew that she could do more. Her openness to examining every aspect of her sales process allowed her to adopt new strategies and techniques that catapulted her performance.

Setting Clear Written Goals - Like most salespeople, Kelly operated on what I call a “wing and a prayer.” She came into each week with activities to do and appointments to set, but her work days lacked the focus that was needed to take her sales to the next level. She was spending time “winging it” and hoping for her big break. Through a disciplined goal achievement process, Kelly was able to identify and focus her activities on those activities that yielded the greatest results.

Overcoming Obstacles - The first step here is to actually identify the obstacles that are getting in your way and then to determine what solutions and action steps you can implement to get around them. The obstacles may be internal or external.

For Kelly, one of her biggest obstacles was her attitude and confidence in her ability to sell larger ticket items. Her average sale was about $1,000. Coaching her through making her first big sale of $50,000 was a breakthrough moment. Before that sale was made, Kelly didn’t believe in her ability to close such a big deal. She didn’t have the confidence to make it happen. Often times, salespeople can’t sell big ticket items, because they personally can’t imagine spending that much money. Changing Kelly’s perception of the value to the client helped shift her own ability to take control of the process.

Accountability - As a coach, part of my job was to hold Kelly accountable. It’s easy to learn new and better ways to sell; it’s much harder to actually implement them and stick to it. Through weekly review of goals and successes, Kelly stayed focused on what she needed to do. Whether you have a coach, mentor, boss or colleague; it’s important to have someone that will hold you accountable. You want someone that will support you, as well as nudge you outside your comfort zone.

The reality is that each of us has the capacity to radically improve our performance like Kelly did, but we get stuck in a rut with our same old habits. Unfortunately, doing the same thing over and over won’t increase your bottom-line. To increase your sales, you have to do things differently. You actually have to implement the things that you know you should be doing, even when you don’t feel like doing it.

So what are you going to do differently tomorrow? Don’t wait for the economy to shift into a higher gear; time’s a wasting.

© Dancing Elephants Achievement Group 2003