What are your selling bright spots? What is working for you and how can you include this in what you do each day?
When small successes are accrued incrementally over time, the net result is a tsunami. You start by dividing the big picture into bite-sized, achievable chunks.
When you focus on what’s working, you stop focusing on fixing what’s broken. That’s when change happens.
My colleagues Nancy Nardin and Lynn Hidy and I are discussing Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s book, Switch, How to Change Things When Change is Hard. We are taking a long hard look at the book’s implications for today’s changing business development and selling paradigms.
In a very small nutshell, the Heath brothers look at how Change is affected, both personally and professionally, in societies, institutions and organizations. Change is created, or thwarted, by Riders of Elephants along a defined Path. If you think herding cats is difficult, try being that over-analytical, skeptical Rider sitting atop that multi-ton energetic Elephant. You hesitate for a moment and the Elephant hunkers down along the default, status quo path instead of pursuing a crystal-clear road towards goal attainment.
When you focus on what’s working, you stop focusing on fixing what’s broken. That’s when change happens.
There’s a lot of negativity surrounding goal-attainment in sales. Most salespeople engage in constant sales mea culpa focused on what they are doing wrong when selling; what they need to fix. Similarly, Sellers focus customers to identifying pain, or the Buyer’s mea culpa that apparently and obviously requires only that Seller’s solution.
When you focus on what’s working, you stop focusing on fixing what’s broken. That’s when change happens.
I seriously doubt that Everyone is doing Everything completely incorrectly. In fact, you probably implement many, small, incremental sales successes each day you sell. So do your customers and prospects. What are these bright spots?
Identify and focus on your selling bright spots. Point yourself in the direction of what’s working, instead of identifying and trying to fix everything that isn’t working.
Focus on the factors within your control: like the things you do very, very well, very naturally and intuitively, and very consistently. You can build entire businesses based on your selling bright spots.
These are your core capabilities as a Sales Person of Worth. These are your Selling Bright Spots.
Today’s selling ecosystem places you, the salesperson, firmly in the middle of the Prospects’ legacy buying process and your own Employer’s legacy selling mindset.
The responsibility for impacting your level of performance falls firmly on your own shoulders. You are the only person capable of making sense of it all.
Start by focusing on Your Selling Bright Spots. For that matter, focus your customers on their own Business Bright Spots.
What is working, and how can you both do more of it, together? – to paraphrase Switch, p 45.
When you focus on what’s working, you stop focusing on fixing what’s broken. By focusing on your selling bright spots, you can leverage that works – for both your and your customers’ benefit.
That sounds like positive change to me.
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, catalyzes business transition, startup growth, and professional development. She is resolved to creating revenue-producing collaboration strategies with and for non-traditional sellers, engineers, manufacturers, and technical startups.
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