| You cannot expect to succeed in sales
or in your personal life without a serious commitment
to personal and professional self-improvement time.
A professional athlete will practice five or six days
a week, twenty to thirty hours each week, to prepare
to play a single game lasting only one or two hours.
Professional sales people should spend more time practicing
and studying than they do making sales presentations
on their actual job.
The time you put into yourself by rehearsing your presentation,
studying or doing research in your field, reading books
or listening to audiotapes, is your practice time. The
amount of time spent (or not spent) preparing for the
actual game will produce great rewards (or negative
consequences). You will win or lose the game, and the
outcome will depend largely upon the amount of time
you have spent in preparation.
The time you put into personal and professional self-improvement
produces rewards, which multiply exponentially. If you
invest a minimum of one hour a day into your personal
and professional self-improvement, you deserve to have
greater success than someone who does not. If you invest
two hours a day into your self-improvement, you deserve
to reap twice the rewards of someone who invests one
hour a day.
You should tape your presentation and write it out.
You should study and constantly strive to improve it.
Some of the best time you can put into self-improvement
will be time studying yourself. If you make the same
presentation every sales call, you should carry an outline
of it with you. You should review it before each sales
call. You should rehearse your presentation before you
deliver it to a prospect, just as an actor rehearses
his or her lines.
You should review your outline again after each presentation
you give. While the presentation you just made is fresh
in your mind, you should perform a constructive self-evaluation.
Evaluate what you believe you did well and what parts
you should spend time working on improvement.
You should look for any common objections you are encountering.
Look for ways during your presentation to answer them.
The best time to overcome any potential objections is
during your presentation, not at the end when your prospect
brings them up.
The first game film a team watches after a game is
the film of the game they just played to evaluate their
most recent performance. Tape your next phone call to
a prospect or carry a pocket tape recorder and tape
your next presentation. I can assure you, you will hear
yourself say things you do not remember saying, as well
as other things you wished you hadn’t said! You
will see that your mind was often focused on your next
statement, while you should have been listening to your
prospect. This is why you can become distracted and
not realize you just ignored your prospect’s last
statement or question.
Keep a notepad with you always and write notes, whether
you are on the phone or in front of a prospect. If you
keep good notes, while you are making a presentation
you can also make notes about areas you want to improve.
Your prospect will appreciate the attention you pay
to their opinions, and it will enable you to remember
what you want to cover and still allow yourself to pay
attention to them.
This tip for applying the principle of self-improvement
can be summed up in the words: “practice, focus,
practice.” After that, you can practice, focus
and practice again. Then come the fruits of maximum
achievement.
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