You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
The Journey of 1,000 miles doesn’t begin with the first step. (You want to make more money in sales?)
It begins with awareness.
Awareness of where you are in this moment, awareness of how you got here, where it is you want to go and awareness of what is required from you in order to get there.
To begin any journey of performance improvement, that awareness is critical.
There are a number of reasons you’ve ended up here, not ended up at your current employer but how you found yourself in the role of sales professional.
1. You made it to university, achieved a suitable qualification and used that qualification to pursue your chosen career in sales.
2. You made it to university, achieved an unsuitable qualification or didn’t achieve any qualification at all and after a gap year, decided to find a job in sales because you needed to pay of your student loan.
3. You were told at a young age, that you had the ‘gift of the gab and would make a great sales person’ and decided to find a job in sales.
4. You were given a job in the family business or a friend of the family’s business.
I wonder how many people actually pick a course at university with the intent of taking a job in sales within that area of specialism.
You study medicine in University, it’s 7 years before you qualify as a junior doctor. Pursue a career in Law, its 4 years before you become a junior. Want to be an architect, is it 6 years?
You get the picture?
For some, working in sales can be one of life’s unintended consequences, for others it can be the only turn available at that metaphorical fork in the road.
And not everyone is lucky enough to be afforded the opportunity of 3rd level education, or any form of education for that matter.
There are plenty of those who have graduated from Life’s University, beginning their careers in sales and flourish to become leaders of business empires who could still buy and sell you today.
The truth is that a high performing sales person can comfortably make more money than any doctor or consultant, lawyer, barrister, architect, without a fraction of the associated risks and without the initial cost burden and barrier to entry.
If money is what motivates you? What if it’s not?
A high performing sales person can ‘comfortably’ make more money than people in those other professions and also ‘uncomfortably’ – that journey is entirely down to you.
If you’re serious about improving your sales performance — whether it’s to make more money in sales or simply to grow as a professional — that awareness is where it all starts.
So, before setting of on this journey of 1,000 miles, I’d like to paraphrase David Byrne of Talking Head’s….“You may ask yourself, how did I get here?”
How DID you get here?
Was it one of the above or none of the above?
Regardless, it is an important question for you to ask of yourself and answer the question as honestly as you can.
No point in fooling yourself. If you know how you got here and why you are here it will prepare you for the rest of this book and the rest of your journey in sales.
You don’t have to like or love the answer you give yourself, you just need to sit with the answer.
Actually sit with the answers.
1.Why are you in sales?
2. How DID you get here?
3. Why this location – Belfast, Dublin, Dungannon, Downpatrick?
4. How did you end up in this sector?
5. How did you end up in this company?
The next question is one of those, on a scale from 1-10…
6. how happy are you with your professional life? (Where 1 is miserable and 10 is ridiculously contented)
7. What is motivating this score?
8. How bad to you want to change?
9. What are you prepared to do to make those changes?
If you want help answering some of those questions and developing a road map onwards, if you want to make more money in sales or simply to grow as a professional — drop me an email paul@shift-control.co.uk
Thanks for reading.
Image by Daniel Joshua from Pixabay
