6.4.2009

Sales is Life or Death

Fight for your Life

It is. If you can’t get sales, you die. That’s why I am so intense and polarizing about this issue.

Sales (and selling) is not a “gray issue”. It’s black-and-white.

It’s not about games or feelings or making people like you.

It’s intense. It’s a fight for survival. It’s life or death.

That’s why I push the entrepreneurs I work with so hard.

If we were playing with beach balls or snow-cones then I would be more relaxed and less of an ass-hole. I wouldn’t care if you succeeded or failed. I would be glad that I’m OK and let you fail…

But REALLY it’s more than life or death. Your death infects those around you…

Here’s something you are forgetting when you half-ass your commitment to selling. The after-life of selling failure threatens a generation of future entrepreneurs. It’s the HIV of free enterprise, and there are no pills to make the rest of your career comfortable — you die!

And the dying process is worse than just being dead.

You sweat and agonize and pain yourself into a million contortioned scenarios in which you try to imagine that doing the same silly mindless process a few more times might work this time (when deep down you know it won’t)…

Sales is a war.

You must be a warrior from the first moment you rise in the morning to do battle.

You must believe that within you is the ability to succeed. It is you that decides the outcome.

It is you that will determine if you live or die.

Decide to live… that death is not option today.

http://thedewview.com Daniel Waldschmidt

….some personal thoughts after a day of doing battle!
http://viewsonbusinessandlife.blogspot.com Colin Martin

Daniel told me today that he got a ton of hate mail over this BLOG post. You know, I don’t even know what to do with that. Quotes like this one are RARE truths and he is so dead on:
“You sweat and agonize and pain yourself into a million contortioned scenarios in which you try to imagine that doing the same silly mindless process a few more times might work this time (when deep down you know it won’t)…”

I know because I have been there. Somehow we fool ourselves into thinking that the law of averages will take over eventually and our blind squirrel asses will somehow find a magical sales nut and everything will be better. NO! Not going to happen. If your sales process is not working, if your sales tactics are not baring fruit its because either you or your product sucks. One is relatively fixable and one is not. PLEASE don’t whine about circumstances. Pick yourself up, change your message and value prop, work harder, turn off the TV, make time in your life, pull your business out of the ditch and become a shinning example of positive effect on everyone you touch.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/lowellnerenberg Lowell Nerenberg

Colin's in-your-face assessment makes sense to me, and I would dig a little deeper into the "victim" salesperson's view of cause. I found that it is a more workable process to consider that I myself may be totally, 100%, responsible for what went wrong (and, of course, what went right, too). Try it on as a game at first, as in: let's see if this game will work. Do it without blaming yourself. Just try on: "If I were totally responsible for what happened, what I did or did not do, what I mistakenly assumed, what I missed, how that other guy did it to me, etc." When I do this always see something useful I did not see before. You may even need to take that question on right in the middle of a pitch that is going south.
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Sales is Life or Death

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