Everyone knows that selling isn’t telling.  You can get away with that when you’re selling a product and the customer comes to you to ask specific questions that validate the buying decision for the customer.  When you’re selling services though telling is a swift way to get yourself uninvited from a sales conversation.

The purpose of effective communication is not to ensure others understand you.  Self-serving communications do not positively impact your sales success.  The real purpose of communication is to produce results through the actions and behavioral responses you’re able to evoke through that communication.

In every sales conversation it comes down to the client agreeing to take some action.  If they don’t you have a stall or objection that delays or prevents that action for occurring.  And that happens because the sales conversation wasn’t mutually effective.

What stimulates a client to take action?  A client is stimulated to take action through their motivation.  It really has little to do with you and what you’re saying, and everything to do with what is motivating enough to the client to make the client move from a state of inaction to a state of action.  And that motivation is always directly proportional to a highly emotional want the client has.

Where does the client’s motivation come from?  The clients motivation is internal.  The client isn’t always able to articulate exactly what that motivation is, and if they haven’t thought things through in detail their motivation may waffle.

What’s your role?  Your purpose is to stimulate action as a result of the mutual understanding you and the client share about their motivation to take action.  Your job is to effectively communicate with the client to help them to uncover, discover, clarify, organize, delineate, etc. the motivation to act that is more powerful than the motivation to stay where they are now.

Procrastination is a success killer.  Procrastination keeps you from enjoying the results you want, and procrastination causes you unnecessary stress.  Many salespeople think procrastination is the result of just being plain lazy, but that isn’t the case at all.

There are 5 reasons you procrastinate:

1. You don’t know what to do
2. You don’t know how to do what you know you need to do
3. You don’t know what to do or how to do it
4. You’re afraid you won’t do it perfectly
5. You’re afraid you’ll make a mistake or be wrong

Now that you understand why you procrastinate the next step is to change that.  There will be times when you’ll come to a cross-roads in your sales career/business when you don’t know what to do because what you’re doing now isn’t producing the results you want.  At those points  it’s critical that you  develop a strategic plan  for  what you’ll do  moving forward.

I’ve seen countless salespeople struggle in a catch 22 because they don’t know how to do what they know they need to do.  Stop dealing with the unnecessary stress and fear that comes from feeling stuck.  Take one of your options: hire someone else to do it, hire someone to teach you how to do it so you can reduce your learning curve, or identify how you’ll learn how to do it yourself and set aside the time to learn it.

You’re a sales professional and it’s important to you to do things right.  But when doing things right keeps you stuck not doing anything at all, there comes a time when you just have to say good is good enough.  You’re better off starting than bemoaning getting it perfect before you can take the next step.

Hello, mistakes are your great teacher.  Everyone makes mistakes and everyone is wrong sometimes.  Take my marketing philosophy to heart and apply it to everything you do, “aim small miss small and fail forward fast”.  If you can’t make mistakes, and you can’t be wrong you can’t learn and reach higher goals.