Five Minutes a Day to Better Sales
Successful sales professionals always work on their skills to keep their career alive. They know that they’ll slip into sales oblivion if they don’t stay fresh and always improving. Read on to discover how to invest just five minutes a day to intentionally grow your sales skills and stay on top of your sales game.
Recognize the Importance of Skills Improvement
Why would you personally want to improve your sales skills? Because it makes every sales call more effective, increases the number of deals you do, and helps you keep more margin thus increasing your income and improving your lifestyle.
When you use the same old sales approaches or employ the same old tactics when facing a problem, you get the same old results.
As customers become increasingly savvy about products and solutions, your value as a sales professional decreases over time. This means you must improve your business skills, sales skills, and technical skills if you’re going to increase your value.
Schedule Sales Skills Improvement
Until you create a Continuously Active Sales Habit (CA$H), schedule time to stop and build your sales skills. This means putting it on your calendar every day for a month, as you build your sales improvement habit.
You may want to make this part of your morning routine even before you check email or log into Facebook. Or you may want to make this part of your end of the day routine before you head home or turn on the TV. Choose a time that you can regularly take five minutes and dedicate it to your personal improvement. This could be the most valuable five minutes of the day.
Choose One of These Skills Improvement Methods
There are may things you can do to improve your sales skills in five minutes. Consider the following list and take action right now to improve you skills.
Search the Web
Think of a sales challenge that you’re having and search the web for solutions. There are hundreds of thousands of articles about sales skills improvement. Search using the key words of your challenge, such as “keeping more margin” or “overcoming price objections” or “effective cold calling.” You’ll be surprised at the quality of suggestions you will find. Select one or two tactics and immediately try them out. Keep the ones that work for you and discard the rest.
Search YouTube
Go to YouTube for example sales scenarios. More and more sales trainers and authors now post video examples of their training and content on YouTube. You can get lots of free ideas from this source. One caveat: make sure that the tactic matches your personality. Some of the more aggressive tactics may not work for you. Some of them don’t work for anybody.
Buy a New Book
Next lunch hour, pull into a book store and buy new sales strategy book. Thumb through the book and make sure that it looks interesting and can address some of your sales challenges. Don’t read the book cover to cover, instead flip around until you find a chapter or paragraph heading that catches your attention. Read that, and if it seems attractive to you, put it into action immediately. This $20 investment could pay off this afternoon.
Read an Old Book
You can also review your existing library of sales books to refresh and renew material you’ve covered in the past. If you’re a seasoned sales professional, odds are good that you’ve forgotten some of the really great ideas that worked for you in the past. All it takes is five minutes to remember a great tactic that can solve an immediate problem.
Sell well!
Mark S A Smith
P.S. Next week, I’ll be in Phoenix helping business owners craft customer acquisition systems for their business. And as always, if you want 15 minutes to talk with me about how to improve your sales, contact me.