No such thing as a freebie

The grass is greener

on the other side. Maybe so but it's usually pretty green right where you're standing. Perhaps the most difficult thing for a salesperson to do is point the finger of blame at themselves. Not to say the customer wasn't interested but rather "I failed to interest the customer." It's harder than you might think.

Salespeople tend to attribute their success and failure to external forces. It was a good day or it was a bad day. We pretend we don't know what we did on the good day to make it good or what we did on the bad day either. Actually, that isn't always true because sometimes we get bold and take credit for the good day but we still proclaim the bad day happened through no fault of our own - it's just the fickle hand of fate.

Well, if you read some of my other post then you know that I call 'em like I see 'em, The truth is you know exactly what you did on the good days to make them good and vise versa. Your product or service remains pretty much the same from day to day. Your clients remains the same as well. The only real variable is us. Sad but true; you can't blame them even though it is certainly easier than pointing the finger back at you.

The great news is that we only have ourselves to blame. We are the only variable. You see, the grass can be green where we're standing as long as we keep our heads screwed on right. If you want to be a sales professional then you have to be "pro" in all aspects of your game.

It's 3:00 o'clock in the morning and you wake up in tremendous pain. You rush to the E.R. to find out that you need an emergency appendectomy. The surgeon is called at home, he gets out of bed and trips and falls over a toy his kid left on the floor. He gets in the car and discovers the battery is dead. Not frazzled, he takes his wife's car only to find it's almost out of gas. While at the gas station filling up it begins to rain in buckets. A car drives through a pothole that just filled with water and completely drenches the surgeon.

When he finally makes it to the hospital and steps into the operating room, all the crap that just happened to him had better go completely out of his mind. He must be able to completely focus on the task at hand. Can you imagine the surgeon coming up after the operation and saying

"Hey listen, I'm really sorry your scar's all f**ked up.
You won't believe what I went through to get here!"

Nobody, especially your customer, cares about your personal bullshit and yet I've heard salespeople say almost nonchalantly "Yeah, my head just wasn't into it today." No one is perfect and we all have bad days and sometimes our head isn't into it.

Just remember that if you blow one - it isn't a freebie. There is no such thing as a freebie. If you blow one it isn't because you've had a bad day - it's the other way around. A lack of focus and the inability to control one's emotions results in a bad day.

Now check this out: If you can control your head and your emotions that little bit extra then amazingly what seemed like a bad day all of a sudden gets good. In fact, it will probably turn into a story for the other salespeople about how the S.O.B. didn't want to buy and how you turned him around. You star! And you are a star because it's true. You kept your head right and you made some green grass.