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Welcome everyone to Mindset Monday. My Name is Luigi and I am the host of the Mindset Monday podcast by Sales IQ. If you haven't listened already, check out our awesome sales-focused podcasts to give you all the sales motivation you need to be the best sales professional you can be.
Let’s jump straight into it and I want to start with a quote from Thomas Edison, who said:
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work”
So, why is that quote as relevant today as it was in the 19th Century?
I've been thinking about this. I've been thinking about what differentiates the top sales professionals from the rest and I've thought about this long and hide for a long time.
But the session that I was on today, gave me a massive ‘ah-ha!’ moment and that was the concept of earning the right to be successful, earning the right to achieve the sales numbers that you work so hard to achieve.
You might be going ‘but Luigi, I do that. I work hard.’
And look, I don’t doubt that you do. But I really want to ask you when you think about this are you using automation platforms for the sake of just sending email after email after email because you think that's what needs to be done?
Are you actually taking the time to learn more about your prospects and diving deep into buyer personas? Are you learning about the industry and trying to walk a day in the shoes of your prospect to really understand what's happening in their world?
How much energy and focus are you putting in to earn the right to get that meeting? Preparation, the time that you're spending preparing for a discovery call.
Are you following up with prospects and giving them value and creating value and not just following up for the sake of following up?
The more and more I think about this, the more and more I think that so many professional sellers and sales people expect to achieve an outcome. They expect leads now. I sound like an old-timer going “Oh, when I started, I had no leads”. But I didn't, I didn't have any inbound leads.
My company said ‘what the fuck am I going to give you leads that's what I pay you to do — to go out and sell’
But yes, there’s been a big market shift and yes, people would argue that ‘hey, you know why shouldn't we bring inbound leads’ and absolutely you should.
But what are you doing to earn the right to even get that inbound lead on the phone?
Even when they've shown some form of intent, what value are you creating for them? What experience are you creating for them? How are you helping them get to that point of decision?
What problem are you helping them solve? What is the impact to the outcome that they’re trying to achieve?
These questions form the fundamentals of sales. These are the things that we must be doing as sales professionals every single day to earn the right to win their business.
Because, at the end of the day, we don't convince them, we don't persuade them. We don't use, you know, some magical tactic that gets them to sign a contract. They have to choose us over our competition. They have to choose us over no decision because we know that no decision is our biggest competitor maintaining the status quo and not doing anything.
These are the two things I want you to ask yourself this week as we move into the second month of 2021:
I really want you to think about these questions. Because if you're walking away from a discovery call going, I could have given more, I could’ve spent more time preparing for that, thinking about the question or reading some press releases or doing some more research — then you're not earning the right to win that proposal and it's just going to be another statistic, another sales proposal that you're sending and you waste your time doing that proposal for somebody to not engage with you and they start ghosting you and we hate that.
I hate that.
It happens to me, of course it does, because sometimes I don't earn the right to move that deal to the next stage of the process.
What we’re finding right now is that we do still live in a world of abundance but the world is still going through a turbulent time and we can't just be wasting opportunities for the sake of wasting opportunity.
You might be reading this and saying ‘but what are you saying with that’ but what I'm trying to say is the opportunity for success is sitting in the palm of your hand — but you got to earn the right.
We don't just want to be wasting opportunities right now (now more than ever before) I want you to really think about this.
As we move into February 2021, I want you to think about how you earn the right to be successful in helping more buyers go through the buying process and choose you.
So look, I really hope this message has resonated with you, or if you feel it will help and resonate with someone you know and they need to hear this, please share this, message them, like the article or the podcast and let us know if it hit home for you because I do these podcasts to help you be the very best sales professional, you can be.
See you on the next Mindset Monday!
Lui
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Photo by Aleks Marinkovic on Unsplash
