photo credit: Rob Lee

Yes, attitude is important.  A salesperson with a poor attitude won’t ever experience the success they could.  However, a super duper ever so positive attitude alone won’t make you successful.  These are what Robert Ringer refers to as the “all show and no dough” folks.  Strive for a confident positive attitude that makes you a pleasant person to be around.

Attitudes drive your behaviors and your behaviors drive your results.  And that’s why a bad attitude is so dangerous to you.  When you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t know why I’m even meeting with this person they’ll never buy anyway” you’ve just determined the outcome of that appointment before you even shake hands.  All throughout the appointment your behaviors will shout your attitude so loud it will be as though you’ve actually said it to the prospect.  Consequently the prospect won’t buy and you get the result you predicted.

Sales requires knowledge.  In many cases you can’t even legally speak to a prospect until you’ve demonstrated you have the minimum required knowledge.  But once you’ve got that knowledge you need to run with it.  When you spot a sales person who has to know everything before they can possibly meet with a prospect you’ve just met a sales person who will never get off the ground.

Sales is a highly rewarded skill.  Observing an average sales person and a top producer doing the same thing is like listening to a piano recital in contrast to a concert.  It’s hard to even tell the same thing is supposed to be happening.

Combine your attitudes with your knowledge and developed skills and you’ll increase sales.  Knowledge is the easy part.  It’s the attitudes and skills that take time and experience to acquire.  And it’s easier to acquire those attitudes and skills with personal help spaced over time than it is on your own.

It never hurts to have a few tools to make things easier.  Jill Konrath is sharing some tools  for presentations and cold calling.  Take a look.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under sales coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.