Bill Bartlett

If you’re in sales, what about the buyer/seller relationship?

This is the time of year when we begin to hear a great deal about setting goals for the New Year. The thought of a fresh year with no blemishes drives many to dream of new beginnings and better performance. The sad truth is that most just talk about goals and rarely act. They are content to fantasize about what could be.

In today’s world, approximately 80% of sales professionals ended up with this career as a default choice. They didn’t set out to be salespeople, but found themselves in this challenging, yet exciting, career. However, many of these “accidental” salespeople give the profession a bad name as they are “professional visitors” with a low price.

All games have rules. Here are the rules to which the upper echelon of sales people are committed: 1. You have to be a hunter to survive. Hunting means spending 60% of your month finding new prospects. By the way, most sales people fail because they approach selling like farming; they plant seeds they hope and pray will grow into their existing customer base. 2. You cannot manage time. You can and must identify and execute behaviors that enable you to master it. Winning sales people know that the phrase “time is money” is a misnomer. They know they can always make more money, but they cannot recover time that has been squandered. They identify income-producing activities and focus on them in a laser-like fashion during their “pay-time” hours.