How to Succeed in Sales?

To succeed in most anything, you must first pay your dues. Olympic athletes don’t just show up in a host city once every four years in order to get some exercise. Instead, these legends in sport invest countless hours of preparation and study before the starting gun goes off. Ultimately, you can be sure that whoever takes home the gold medal at the end of the day has paid their dues well in advance.

Speaking of paying your dues, I’ve always said that I would have joined the military right out of college if I could enlist as a Colonel. Think about it, you’d get a company car, free meals, housing provided, and you’d get saluted everywhere you went. Unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way.

So, instead of joining the military, I went into sales. I didn’t really know much about selling when I first started, but they were willing to “train” me and I was willing to learn. Lo and behold, I finished my first full year on commission at a whopping 45% of my sales quota; which I actually thought was good. I was glad to be above zero, to be honest. My manager didn’t share the same opinion. Still, I hung in there year after year and I busted my butt to make the grade, but I didn’t achieve my quota a single time in my first five years in sales. Things were not going well to say the least. I did, however, come into the office two or three nights a week to completely reorganize our resource library, so putting together customer presentations and responding to RFPs became exponentially easier. I also read every magazine article I could find that had anything to do with healthcare, because I was selling into the healthcare marketplace at the time. I didn’t receive any compensation for that extra effort, though I’m pretty sure that my sheer desire to add value is why they kept me on board.

Similarly, after I had started to figure it out and finished multiple consecutive years above 200% of my sales quota, I sat down to write my first book. What did I know about writing books? Nothing—I just started putting words on paper—a purging of my strategy on selling you might say. Within 90 days, I had compiled 270 pages of written material. I decided I better read it to see if I was on track. Frankly, it was terrible. Sure, I had amassed a cacophony of ideas, but the material was hardly book-worthy. It wasn’t even editable. So, I shoved it aside and started again, this time trying to organize the concepts into some sensible format rather than a random mind dump. Eleven months later, I had completed just shy of 300 pages. So, I decided to go back and read it again. Frankly, it read just as poorly as the first time around. That was discouraging to say the least.

Nobody paid me a cent for rewriting the book five times over three years, followed by nine (count ‘em) back and forth editing passes before Secrets of Question Based Selling was eventually published. It was all on my dime, but mostly the investment involved a tremendous amount of time, effort, and personal sacrifice.

Meanwhile, while I was working on the book and holding down my day job, I was also working to organize the system I had developed into a repeatable methodology that could be customized and taught to sales organizations in virtually ay other industry. Again, it was a long hard road before I had a product that was ready for prime time. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t paid for any of these efforts either.

As it turns out, my commitment to making sure QBS would exceed expectations has paid off many times over, mostly because I was willing to invest the time, effort, and commitment (i.e. pay my dues) in advance. What have I gotten in return? Well, my outstanding student loan was paid off in six months. I haven’t made a single mortgage or car payment in the last 23 years. In fact, we have no debt of any kind. Both of our kids’ college is totally funded. I was able to buy my mother a house. We give generously to causes we believe in, and financial security is something we no longer have to think about. My intention here is not to brag about myself or boast in any way. Just making the point that none of these things would be true if I had not been willing to invest the extra effort upfront.

Do you want to know how to turn extra effort into real dollars?

It’s simple: all you have to do to be successful in sales is be willing to put in the time and effort necessary to “out-work” the rest of the pack. Think about it this way. Somebody is going to succeed in the next account; it might as well be you.

Our oldest daughter is about to graduate from the University of South Carolina next month. She doesn’t have a job lined up yet, but that’s fine by me. Instead, she completely buys into the strategy that if she can finish strong and maintain her 3.8 GPA, then she won’t have any trouble finding opportunities in the month or two after graduation. Again, pay your dues upfront and opportunities will follow.

Of course, when she does jump into the job market, she won’t get paid a dime for the time she invests interviewing, or even for hustling to set up potential interviews. At that point it comes down to her willingness to put in the necessary investment in time, effort, and personal sacrifice. She can watch Ellen, play video games, or hang out on Facebook once she lands an opportunity. But until then, the daytime hours give her opportunities to be on the phone or meeting with people, and the evening is a great time to write thank you notes or introduction letters. Somebody’s going to get the best jobs, it might as well be my daughter.

So, let me get back to asking: how many articles have you read about your industry in the last 90 days? Great! Now double that number in the next 90. Become an expert on your customer’s world. Sure, you could just try to be empathetic and walk a mile in their shoes. But, if you are committed to paying your dues upfront, then I would recommend that you keep walking until you’ve lapped the field and there’s an perceptible difference between talking with you and your competitors.

Similarly, with your newfound expertise, don’t wait for the corporate marketing department to create the next presentation at some point down the road. Be creative to develop your own presentations that are more detailed and much more impactful than the customer has ever seen. At the same time, learn how to work the white board, and how to visually explain how your product can impact their business more than other options in the marketplace.

Trust me. If you are willing to go above and beyond and put in the extra effort even when you are not being directly compensated, two things will happen:

a.) First, you will never have to worry about money again.

b.) Second, your services will be in high demand, so you will never again have to worry about landing a top job. 

At the end of the day, success is a choice, not a lottery. So, what if you choose to take all the resources you might otherwise spend hoping to win the human lottery and instead invest heavily in yourself? For the people who are willing to turn off the TV, suspend video games, and maybe even skip a few bowling nights, the odds are stacked heavily in your favor. Of course, this article is sincerely meant to encourage you to be part of the solution, but at the end of the day, the ball is ultimately in your court. The difference between whatever level of success you desire and where you currently are is you. The good news is, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. The QBS Methodology has already been created. All you have to do is be willing to discard old-school sales approaches that no longer work and put a series of proven strategic and techniques into practice. From there the formula for success is relatively simple. If you are willing to invest in your own skill set, the way I invested in myself when I created QBS, then to steal a line from the late Zig Ziglar, “.”