Career Sales Training: What Are You Willing To Risk To Succeed?

Top producer’s don’t become top producers by being “also rans” in the business. Sales is risky business, and if you want to succeed you need to be willing to take some risks. Now I’m not talking about willy-nilly risks or life threatening risks I’m talking about calculated risks that present a greater potential for gain than what you’re doing now. Your peers may wonder what you’re doing, but when you start getting great results they’ll want to know everything. Don’t tell them, or you’ll have a bunch of poorly adapted clones out there taking what you do well and making you look like a copy.

Something about you needs to be different. I don’t mean gimmicky or funny different. The kind of different I’m talking about is in the value you bring that isn’t there with other people doing exactly what you’re doing. One way to make yourself different and immediately recognizable as having more value to your potential customer, is by having a deeper level of connection with and to them than anyone else in the business.

You may be getting good results now, but why settle for good ever? Take what’s working and make it even better by trying different things. Now you don’t want to just start trying a bunch of random things. You want to know your numbers on what you’re doing now. Then you want to make trackable changes, and collect the data on those changes in relation to what you already know works. This allows you to make incremental improvements and keeps you from making radical crash and burn moves.

Some of the best ideas and knowledge to be had are outside of your own industry. Learning things from other industries and applying that knowledge to what you’re doing is a way to take something that has been proven to work and implement it into what you’re doing. It’s also a way to make remarkable break through improvements. On a company level, look at how well customer reward programs have worked and been adapted to many industries. What is being done by sales people in another industries that you could adapt for yourself?

Are you willing to risk failing to succeed? Sometimes the fastest way to succeed is to fail and to fail fast. Keep your failures on a small scale and learn the valuable lessons so you can quickly make the adaptations you need to get great results. Look at is this way the more things you know that don’t work the closer you are to finding at least one that’s a gang buster.