Your referral sales legacy is the goal of your professional development efforts. Not making your numbers, crushing your quota and winning prizes.
Is professional development your bulls-eye? Or is your eye on your quarterly bottom line?
There’s no enduring value in your short-sightedness.
All those glittery rewards are not the true business gold that you represent – can truly represent – to your current and future customers.
Your referral sales legacy is measured in years, not quarters. Your true reward, the enduring business outcomes you create for your customers, is paid forward when they refer you to others.
Your true reward, the perceived value of the enduring business outcomes you create for customers, is the repeat engagement they contract you for. Sometimes years later.
Is your sales goal one of creating your referral sales legacy?
I didn’t think so.
You are being pressured by KPI-focused managers to sell more, better, faster. Or to involve less billable time when winning, designing, developing and manufacturing output.
It’s difficult to take the time to develop the values, mindset, skill set and tools to support the long-tail value of creating a referral sales legacy.
Yet you can by starting off simply.
Your referral sales legacy is a matter of how you treat others. Treat others far better than you, yourself, are being treated. The “we” part of your sales equation rubs off on you as well.
Your referral sales legacy starts with professional self-respect. Many folks in sales “fall” into the profession because they can’t find another job. There’s no shame in that. Your problem is that you still regard selling as a “temporary” profession.
Thing is, you are darn good at it. Because you sell with elegance, humility, confidence and a value system that extends far beyond your company’s products, services and platforms.
Those are the “features and benefits” that your customers invest in. Those are the intangibles that form the basis of your referral sales legacy.
Your referral sales legacy is far more than the latest sales book you read or methodology you are trained in. Your referral sales legacy is built upon who you are, as a Business Person of Worth.
When your goal is creating your referral sales legacy, you will stop wrestling with unpredictable revenue streams as you make your numbers, meet your quota and develop enduring business relationships with your customers.
Selling becomes a natural extension of who you are as a Business Person of Worth.
If I’ve just described your personal philosophy towards the sales profession, carry on. If I haven’t, chew on this blog post for a while.
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, is a business coach and management consultant. Her Workshops create Playbooks for startups and small to mid-size companies who want to grow, expand and sustain their businesses, but wrestle with unpredictable revenue streams. Her Playbook on leadership, business development and collaboration strategies, including tools, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
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