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If you haven’t read Harvey Mackay’s book “Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty”, I highly recommend it.  It is a great book about building networks.  The main point of the book is that there is no better time than now to prepare for the future.  Thus the title.  If you wait until you are thirsty before you decide to start digging your well, it’s already to late.  Digging a well takes time, so you need to start digging it long before the thirst hits you.  The same thing can be said of sales.  Most average salespeople that I have known usually want to only call on prospects who have immediate needs.   The reasoning is that the hotter the prospect, the quicker the road to a sale, resulting in a quicker commission.  The problem with that strategy is that in order to build a solid relationship with a prospect, you need to start building the relationship long before he needs your product.  And as far as I am concerned, relationship selling is the ONLY way to build a successful LONG TERM sales career.  In the book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Dr. Stephen Covey coined the term ”emotional bank account” to describe how trust is built between two people.  By performing little acts of kindness over time, a person makes small “deposits” into a reserve of trust.  Although, in his reference, Dr. Covey intends this metaphor to be more a description for intimate relationships than for business relationships, in actuality, there is very little difference between the two when it comes to building long term trust.  I like to call it building emotional equity.  If you are in the business of selling high dollar services or products, the more emotional equity that you have built up with your prospective customer(s), the better your chances are of making the sale.  If your competitor has more emotional equity invested in the relationship than you do, your chances of making the sale is greatly diminished.  That is why it is always an advantage to begin building your relationships as early as possible.  Think about it.  If your best friend sold Ford pick-up trucks, but you weren’t in the market to buy a pick-up truck anytime soon, would he stop being your friend or would he stop being nice to you?  Of course not.  Three years from now if you were now ready to buy a truck and you wanted a Ford, would you even consider buying it from anyone else?  Probably not.  Let me give you another example.   Let’s say you had a neighbor who had lived next door to you for the past four years.  Over the years, although you never really disliked each other, neither one of you ever went out of your way to become friends.  Then one day your neighbor got a new job at another company.  As luck would have it, his new job is purchasing manager for one of the largest companies in the country.  What’s more, this company is a prime candidate for your product.  What do you do now?  If you hadn’t reached out to your neighbor in the past, how much success do you think that you’ll have now trying to be his friend all of a sudden?  The point is, that if you are going to try to build a long term career in sales, you need to keep two things in mind: 

1) You need to be nice to everyone that you meet because you never know when you they might be in a position to help you.  I remember one account that I did business with hired a young girl out of college as a receptionist.  I spoke to her on the phone for about 6 months before I ever met her in person, but I was always respectful to her on the phone when I called to speak to the purchasing manager.  It wasn’t long before she got promoted to assistant purchaser and she gave me a $1 million contract.  I am not exaggerating when I say that you should try to make friends with everyone you meet.  Besides, you can never have too many friends.  

2) Unless you’re in a position to always be the lowest priced product on the market, you need to start working on strategies for relationship selling.  Don’t just wait until a company needs your product before you decide to start calling on them.  Take the offensive.  Make a ”hit list” of companies that you want to target, irregardless if they have any immediate needs for your product or not.  So there’s two new years resolutions.  1) resolve to be nicer to everyone that you meet and 2) set your sights on some of those  accounts in your sales territory that you haven’t called on yet just because you thought that they weren’t a good prospect for your product.  Who knows, maybe the purchasing manager at one of those companies is in line for a new job somewhere else where they do need your product.     

If you are involved in sales, and you have an annual sales quota that you have to meet, goal setting is a must.  And there is no more optimal time for setting your sales goals than the beginning of the year.  All large goals become more manageable when broken down into smaller steps.  For example, your annual sales quota should be broken down into twelve equal quotas, one for each month of the year.  Likewise, each monthly sales quota should then be broken down into four equal weekly sales quotas.  You  now have fifty-two weekly quotas that are going to be much easier to manage, track, plan for and complete, just because the smaller quotas make your larger goals seem much more attainable.  In addition, by breaking the larger goal into smaller steps, if you happen to start falling behind schedule, you will be alerted sooner and therefore able to make the necessary adjustments to your strategy before it’s too late.  I shouldn’t have to tell you that if you are falling short or your sales goals, the earlier that you realize this, the better off that you are in terms of taking corrective actions.  

It’s been said many times by many people much wiser than I, that a goal is not a goal until you write it down.  There is a lot of truth to this.  Although, if I get thrown over board in the middle of a lake and my goal is to swim to shore in order to survive, I probably don’t need to have that goal written down.  Some goals are just self evident.  Nobody wants to get fired or lose their job, but I don’t advocate writing that down as one of your goals.  But I digress…  If you have a tough task that you want to accomplish, writing it down certainly doesn’t hurt.  Some advocates tell you to have a list of your goals in plain sight where you can see them every day in order to remind yourself what it it that you are striving for.  If you are comfortable with with that, then no problem.  Personally, I like the implied auto-suggestion that seeing your list of goals everyday could create.  But perhaps you don’t want your goals out in the open where anyone can see them.  Whatever your preference might be, I do recommend writing down your goals, breaking them down into smaller steps and making sure that you put then in a place that is easily accessible to you so that you can review them on a regular basis in order to monitor your progress and to remind your subconscious of your desired intentions. 

Now you have a map.  But remember, this is only a map.  If you don’t put one foot in front of the other and head in the direction that your map is directing you towards, you won’t get there.  As the Chinese say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  But I wouldn’t want to begin that journey without a detailed map.       

How do you read books?  This might sound like a strange question at first, but bear with me.  The real question is how do you maximize your reading retention?  After all, it doesn’t do you any good to read a book if you don’t remember what you read two or three months later.  (One quick note: please keep in mind that for our purposes, we are strictly talking about educational books here.  If you read novels and other fictional books for recreational purposes, then reading retention shouldn’t be an issue)  Anyway, obviously, there is no absolute way to guarantee that you will remember 100% of everything that you read, but there are proven methods to improve how much you are retaining from the books that your read.  The point here is that reading a book is a major investment of your time, so you definitely want to make sure that you get the maximum benefit out of everything that you read.  Let’s take it in steps.

Step No. 1:

You read the book.  Page by page, chapter by chapter.  From front to back.  I suspect that this is probably the method that most people use whenever they read.  Nothing wrong with this.  But a month or two later, if not a week or two later, you’ve probably forgotten most of what you read.  So there’s really not a lot of learning going on here.  But don’t get me wrong, this is better than not reading at all.

Step No. 2:

You read the book, exactly as your would in step 1, but you highlight or underline as you go.  Definitely a major improvement over step one and the effort is minimal.  The benefits of highlighting as your read are multiple.  First, it forces you to pay closer attention, so those occasional periods of reading where you sort of zone out for a few seconds and go into “cruise control” don’t happen quite as often.  Second, by looking for important passages to highlight as your read, your brain is forced to process the information better as you search for the main points of each chapter.  Third, highlighting important points of the book creates a “breadcrumb” trail so that if you ever want to go back over the book later on, you don’t necessarily have to re-read the entire contents of the book.  Perusing through each chapter and taking in what you have highlighted takes just a few minutes and should create enough of a spark for you to recall the major points of the book. 

By the way, I prefer using a highlighter, but as I will cover later, using a pen or a pencil to underline can be a time saver if you decide to go to the next level.

Step 3:

This step involves Step 1, Step 2 and then one additional step.  Write notes in the margins of the book.  An important point to make here is that I have found that using hardback books makes it a lot easier to write notes in the margins than paperbacks.  But maybe that’s just me.  Anyway, by highlight AND jotting down notes in the margin, your “breadcrumb” trail just got better and your retention rate also is going to automatically improve.  The notes that you jot down can be one of two types.  You can basically just mimic in writing the important points that you want to remember or you can write down your own personal interpretations of what it is that you think the author is trying to convey.   The main points and purposes of this step is to 1) help you better retain what you read and 2) serve as a quick reference guide should you ever go back to review the book months or years later.     

Step 4:

Step 4 involves step 1, step 2, step 3 and then one additional step.  Remember, this works better with hardback books, because they typically provide a few blank pages in the front and the back of most books.  As you find one or two really important points in each chapter, (or in each page for that matter, depending on how many blank pages that the publisher has provided), jot down the page number and a one or two sentence note.  Personally, I like to write down the passages verbatim, but your preference may vary.  The point is, what you are trying to do is create a sort of mini “clif- notes” reference for the book.  In fact, I got this idea from a book by Tim Sanders, Love is A Killer Ap.  Tim calls step 2 “tagging” and Step 4 “cliffing”.  Tagging and cliffing.  I like that term. 

Remember I said earlier that I like to use a highlighter.  Some might prefer to use a pen (or pencil) to underline instead of highlighting.  I find it hard to make nice, neat straight lines, so for me highlighting is faster and easier.  But then it might take you a little bit longer since you will have to be switching from highlighter (when tagging) to pen (when cliffing).  For this reason, I have gotten in the habit of reading each chapter twice, first to highlight and then to write my notes. 

Remember, this is not about how fast you can read a book, but about maximizing the benefit of the time invested.  As I have state in my web site, finding the time to read (and now write) is one of the biggest challenges that I face.  So why do I want to make it more laborious?  Because in the long run, these steps maximize your reading investment by improving your reading retention and in the end, the books you’ve read and marked up are now a handy reference guide for you to refer back on. 

Note:  Original post date for this entry, Dec. 27, 2006. 

OK. It’s not quite official yet, but I have decided to make a major change in my career. In my last post I wrote about fear, and I briefly touched on some major changes that were about to happen in my life. Well, this morning I gave notice that I was contemplating a job offer with another company. Aside from the increased salary and incentive package, all of which are usual components of a job change, there was more to it than that. Without boring you with the details, I’ll just say that after two years of working with the current ownership, I just felt that it was time for a change. I don’t intend to ever use this site to trash anybody, but it’s hard to stay in business with someone who doesn’t keep their promises. So barring some last minute concessions, which I don’t expect to be forthcoming, I will start the new year with a new boss, a new company and a new company car!  But hopefully I’ll keep most of my old customers.

In my first post, I promised you I’d discuss ways to overcome your fears. Starting a new job is always a little bit scary, so I feel like I’m in pretty good position to discuss this topic first hand.  Anyway, I’m sure that there are many ways to manage your fears, but the only way that I know to overcome your fears is with self-confidence. With increased confidence comes reduced fears. So how do you get more self-confidence? With hard work. Read, research, study, network, then plan and stratigize. These are all ways to make sure that you are fully prepared. And the more prepared that you are, the more confidence that you will have in yourself. There is no other way to go about it. There are no shortcuts.  The time between Christmas day and New Years is the perfect time to review the last year and plan for the coming year.  This is the most reasonable time for reflecting and planning for several reasons.  First of all, typically, there is really very little business activity going on as far as business to business sales is concerned.  Secondly, the end of the year is the most logical time to review the last four quarters and subsequently, the beginning of the year is the best time to set new sales quotas, set new goals and formulate new selling strategies.  As you begin to learn how to prepare better for your job, your career, your goals, your quotas, your sales calls, whatever it is that you are finding particularly challenging, you will find your self-confidence strengthening and your fears diminishing.  As your fears diminish, your will begin to take on bigger and bigger challenges.  Due to your hard work, you will soon find yourself enjoying more and more successes, which will propel you into taking on bigger and bigger challenges, which will lead to bigger and bigger successes.  You get the idea.  It’s the old snowball effect.  As Woody Allan once said, ”half of life is just showing up”.  As you build your selling skills by reading and research, you’ll feel more comfortable “showing up” for more sales calls.  I remember a time when I used to get intimated when making cold calls on the telephone.  I suspect that my reaction was not unlike a lot of other salespeople.  I’d come up with every excuse not to make that call.  Then one day, I decided to try a very simple idea.  I tape a one word note to my computer screen.  The word was fear.  It was a reminder to myself that although fear might be normal, it was also unfounded.  It was all just in my head.  That note served me well, as I eventually overcame my fears just by having that note to remind myself that there are people out there that not only need my services, but if I have done my research right, and I am fully prepared and know how to qualify prospects quickly and professionally, I won’t waste their time or mine and we’ll both feel much better about me having made that telephone call to them. 

Editor’s note:Due to technical difficulties, this post was originally dated for Dec. 26, 2007. 

Changes are in my future and I don’t mind telling you that I am a little scared. Changes can be good or bad, but they are almost always scary, because we get comfortable with the status quo and we fear the unknown. I suspect that even the bravest individuals, when asked, would confess to fearing the unknown. I remember hearing a quote that said that bravery was not a lack of fear, but rather, that bravery was the act of taking action in spite of your fears. The field of sales requires small acts of bravery on a regular basis. Business cannot be sustained without new accounts. And new accounts cannot be won unless salespeople take the initiative to make the first move and reach out to new prospects. That can be quite a scary process in and of itself. As professional salesmen, we know that, just like a baseball player at bat, our chances of success on any new account is about 33% at best. So having said that, even the most successful salesmen stand the chance of getting rejected by about 6 or 7 of every 10 new prospects. If you don’t learn to handle rejection, the fear of rejection can cripple your sales career. FEAR is your biggest enemy. So every time that you set out to call on someone new, whether it be on the telephone or in person, just remember that fear is normal. Once you realize that fear is normal, you are on the road to overcoming it. Next time we’ll talk about some ways to overcome it and I’ll let you know about the changes in my life.