Keith Rosen's Executive Sales Coaching Blog on Selling, Leadership, Management

Archive for November, 2006

What’s Blocking Your Sales Mojo?

Nov 28, 2006 All About Selling, How To Close The Sale, How To Sell and Sales Tips, Insights in Business, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, Sales Training, Selling Advice

Excerpt from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Closing the Sale by Keith Rosen. Reprinted with permission by Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Release Date, January, 2007. Visit www.guidetoclosingthesale.com.

Your sales mojo is the energy or presence you show up with during every meeting with a prospect. It’s that allure, charisma, or vibe you radiate that every one of your prospect’s feel from you.

Your sales mojo encapsulates the inner game of selling, which is who you are and how you come across when speaking with others. Developing your sales mojo goes beyond the basics of learning a presentation, selling strategy or pitch, which is what superficial sales training is only capable of teaching you.

While an experienced, certified sales coach can assist you in uncovering and developing your authentic sales mojo, the consequences of not doing so can be severe. Just take a look at some of these limiting beliefs that prevent the natural flow of your mojo.

• “You can’t close someone in our business. They have to be ready to buy. And when they’re ready, they’ll call me.”
• “I’m not good at closing. I hate putting pressure on people.”
• “I’ve tried some closing tools before and they didn’t work for me.”
• “I had a horrible experience when I attempted to get the prospect to make a decision.”
“I hate when people try to close me.”

Whatever the reason, whatever the story, every salesperson, manager and business owner has their own opinion on what it means to close a sale and why they can or cannot do so successfully.

A little personal history about your author. It was shortly after I decided to become a coach. Now, at this point, I’ve been coaching for about 16 years now. Yup, I was one of the first sales and business coaches to hang my shingle, a true pioneer in the coaching profession, if you will and one of the first Master Certified Coaches to get credentialized. (Okay, enough shameless plugs; for now.)

As you can imagine, I was certainly ahead of the curve. Being an innovator and a leader in this now rapidly growing profession of life and business coaching, I had to create my own road to achieve success, as there was no other proven path to follow. Being a leader in such a young industry certainly had its advantages. However, it also came with some tall challenges that needed to be eliminated.

At this point, I had sold my business (of course, with the unwavering support of my wife, as nervous as she may have been.) So, here I was, with no income stream coming in as I launched full steam into an unproven and unknown profession with only my experience in managing and owning several other businesses to help guide me.

One thing was for certain. I had a very strong sales and marketing background. After all, when I owned my other businesses, I was the one responsible for the recruiting, hiring, training, managing and coaching of all our employees.

In an attempt to apply my wisdom, I came up with some best practices and developed what was to be my first of several attempts to put my new selling strategy together.

I started doing what I knew how to do, that was to pick up the phone and start making cold calls. And to my surprise, I was very successful at getting through the door and into an appointment with the decision maker. Without minimizing my efforts and results, what I had encountered when meeting with these prospects was that most of the time they wanted to meet with me out of sheer curiosity. After all, at this point, no one had ever heard of coaching outside athletic or sport coaching. So, I had the advantage of positioning business and life coaching as something new and unique.

A month later, I wasn’t even making enough money to stay broke. Pitch after pitch, presentation after presentation, I kept hearing the same thing. “It sounds really interesting Keith but I just can’t see how we can apply this to what we’re doing right now. Lets stay in touch and maybe some time in the future we can look at this again. But hey, it sounds real cool what you’re doing now. Good luck!”

Give Value

With all of the prospects that I had generated over the last month and the results I’ve experienced from my lackluster selling efforts, it was time to re-evaluate. So, I did what any new, intelligent, humble and highly evolved coach would do. I called my coach for help.

And after I shared with her what I’ve gone through, do you know what she told me in all of her years of wisdom? “Keith, you have to stop presenting and just give value.”

“What the heck does that mean?” I thought. I had no clue what she was talking about. Give value? Well, I took her coaching and put forth my best effort in deciphering what I thought she meant. I started thinking about how I could, as my omnipotent coach said, “give value.”

A funny thing happened. I stopped talking and started listening more. I stopped pitching and presenting and started asking better questions. Since my coach didn’t share with me a strategy to give value, by default, I had to figure out and uncover what value meant to each prospect I spoke with. And the only way to uncover each prospect’s perception and definition of value, I needed to ask more questions.

Talk about one of those “Aha!” moments! My coach knew exactly what she was doing. Rather than deliver the same presentation or a revised presentation to every prospect, she opened up a new possibility for me to find out what value looked like from the eyes of every prospect rather than from my own. What evolved was a process of inquiry and a defined set of questions I used when meeting with each prospect.

You see, the gem I discovered very quickly when it came to selling my training and coaching services was totally counterintuitive. That is, you can’t sell coaching. Or at least not in the traditional sense of selling. Talk about your paradoxes.

Let me say this another way. Because coaching is about the investment in yourself and your own personal or professional development, the client has to be ready and willing to be coached.

Either you are ready to generate substantial unprecedented results both in your life and your career and are willing to be accountable, honest and do what is necessary (in your integrity of course) to achieve your goals or you are not.

Luckily, none of my early closing techniques worked on any of the prospects I saw thus far. Because if they did, then you can bet I would not only be working with less clients but clients that I would probably be much better off without. (If I didn’t ask questions, then how would I know if there’s a good fit?) Discovering this inspired me to develop an entirely different model that went against traditional selling.

I stopped trying to close and I started opening. The point I want to drive home is this; I’ve never had to close another sale again.

Master the Basics

Nov 20, 2006 All About Selling, Business Advice, Business Coaching, Clients are fun. Case Studies in Sales and Leaders..., Goal Setting, How To Sell and Sales Tips, Leadership Academy, Life Coaching and Career Coaching, Sales Training, Selling Advice, Setting Goals, Time Management Tips

A client I had worked with about a year ago recently emailed me, requesting some time to talk. When we finally got on the phone together, it was apparent why.

Miki was a seasoned executive recruiter. She hired me initially because her sales were down and thought a coach might be able to give her the extra guidance and motivation she needed to get out of this slump. (She was right.)

After three months of coaching, Miki was back on top, the top fifth recruiter out of about 200.

Well, recently it seems as if Miki’s numbers were sliding again and instead of waiting, she immediately reached out for help.

“Keith, I don’t know what’s going on. I mean, I know we haven’t worked together in about a year and for a while I was doing great! But for some reason, I’m feeling stuck again.”

“I’m glad you reached out as soon as you noticed that something was off. Lets do a quick diagnostic and see how things are running.”

“Sure.”

“So, if you were standing on a 100 foot balcony looking down onto your entire sales process, where do you feel the breakdown is occurring; when attempting to get the appointment, when presenting, closing, or following up?”

“Well, I’m using your template for cold calling and that continually works great so the leads are pretty consistent. And the presentation seems to go just fine. So, I guess closing the sale is where I’m stumbling. If I were to look at what’s taking up my time now, I have a handful of proposals out there waiting to be closed. And the prospects I’m meeting with are just not closing; for whatever reason or excuse they give me. The proposal stage and their decision making process seems to drag on indefinitely.”

“So, you’re getting in front of the right people, you feel that your presentation flows well and that you are doing a good job establishing a rapport and relationship with your prospects. However, you feel that these prospects should be able to make their decision faster as it relates to buying from you or not, is that what I’m hearing?”

“Yes, Keith, that’s right.”

“Miki, in the spirit of exploring every possibility and not to step over anything, are you still using the sales process that we put together?”

“Oh yes, of course!”

“You are. Good. Then lets take a quick look at a few things you’re currently doing. Miki, do you remember when we developed your pre-closing and reconfirmation approach to include at the end of your presentation?”

“Um, yes.”

“Are you still asking those five pre-qualifying questions before you discuss your pricing? You know, those questions that ensure you’ve addressed every concern they have, while confirming that your service is something they can clearly benefit from?

Silence. Then, Miki responded quietly with, “Hmm. No, I forgot about those.”

“Well that’s good news! At least we’ve uncovered one critical step in your process that you’re not currently doing which has proven to be very effective. Once you start asking these questions again, you will notice a big difference in your performance. In addition, you won’t be wasting your time drafting proposals and following up with unqualified prospects who you shouldn’t be following up with in the first place.

And what about the questions we developed to defuse the objections you hear? I know that you were running into the “send me a proposal” and the “I have to talk this over with my board” and the infamous “that’s a lot of money” objection. The rebuttals we developed were squashing and preventing these objections consistently, remember?”

“Yes, I most certainly do remember, Keith. I especially remember that when I used them, these objections weren’t getting in my way! The problem is I totally forget about those rebuttals as well! How weird is that?”

We ended our call a few minutes later after I coached Miki and her memory on what she needed to reconnect with in her selling approach. Not surprisingly, she emailed me a week later about a few sales she was able to close as a result of doing what she needed to do again; the basics. Miki got back to the basics of what made her successful.

Interestingly, while I identified certain things that Miki clearly needed to change for the better, it was nothing she hasn’t tried, created or done successfully before. Her real enemies were success, complacency and time.

Whether we’re in a slump or selling like a pro, when something is always going on we become blind to it. That includes becoming complacent or often blind to the good things in our life as well as the bad. Of course, this does not exclude the productive behavior and actions we take in addition to the unproductive ones. We sometimes forget what has worked for us, what has specifically contributed to our success; the things that have become habitual. And when something becomes a habit, it’s now working in the background of our lives, being done without conscious attention. We no longer have to think about doing them. Therein lies the danger.

Tip from The Executive Sales Coach:
Here’s an elusive diversionary tactic to consider.
If you continually forget everything you’ve learned, then you can always claim that you have adopted and utilized what you’ve learned. And if you continually feel that you’re using everything you’ve read, heard or seen and nothing is working, what a wonderful opportunity to look outside yourself and blame your poor performance on everything except you. After all, you’ve tried and done everything, right? In your mind you have the validation to support such a claim, which is really an excuse in disguise. So, if you forget about it, then you are always right (and never accountable). Get it?
When coaching someone out of a slump who has all of the right components to succeed, most of the time it’s the basics which have been ignored or forgotten that contributed to the breakdown. The basic questions we ask, the presentation we deliver, the process we’ve developed that has successfully worked time and time again. Some how, some way, we get sidetracked, distracted or seduced by something we perceive to be better (or worse), like a new selling strategy or approach, status quo, even our attitude. Consequently, we mistakenly change what was clearly identified as an approach or mindset that was working well.

The next time you experience a selling slump or you feel that sales aren’t coming to you as easily has they once did, go back to the basics. Instead of doubting yourself and your abilities, see what you need to be reminded to do consistently again in your selling approach. Look at the engine that drives your sales. You may notice that the only thing needed may be a quick tune up to enhance your performance. It’s all in your control.

Customers Don’t Want a Relationship With You

Nov 14, 2006 All About Selling, Business Advice, Executive Coaching, Experiences in Marketing, How To Sell and Sales Tips, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, Sales Training, Selling Advice

To become a great salesperson you need to foster and build strong relationships with you prospects and clients. The stronger the relationships that you build with your customers, the easier it will be to sell them, serve them and support them. While this is certainly true, essential and indisputable in some cases and professions (doctors, coaches, therapists, certain transactions with long selling cycles, to name a few) it is not an absolute principal that I would endorse in every situation and can actually hurt your selling efforts.

Here’s why. Some people are just not interested in a relationship. Some people want to get in, make a purchase and get out, keeping it purely transactional. After all, when was the last time you went out to lunch with the person who fills your gas tank, your pharmacist, your local cable provider or the rep who you speak with when calling your phone company?

There’s a big difference between developing a relationship and being pleasant, friendly and service driven. One requires no extra time on your part, one can potentially become all time consuming. (Research, reports, diligence, follow up and so on.)

Just to be clear, I’m separating sales and marketing (networking) activities as well because when you’re truly looking to build a relationship, then you have a few of your personal needs and agenda wrapped up in the sale. No good.

Look at this from a different angle for a moment. Lets say you sell insurance. Before you sold insurance, did you ever go out to lunch or meet on a social level with your insurance agent? How about the person who sold you your home, copier, or car?

So what is ultimately my point? Rather than you assuming that your prospects want a relationship, ask them.

Ask a question to uncover what their expectations are regarding the type of relationship they want with the salesperson such as, “What are your expectations of the person you are going to buy from?” “If you were in my shoes, what would I want to know about you that would help earn your business?”

These questions assist you in crafting the perfect presentation or relationship, every time.

Build the Confidence of A Champion

Nov 10, 2006 All About Selling, Books by Keith Rosen, Clients are fun. Case Studies in Sales and Leaders..., Executive Coaching, How To Close The Sale, Life Coaching and Career Coaching, Prospecting, Cold Calling and Networking, Sales Management

The Secret to Building the Confidence of A Champion

Excerpt from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Closing the Sale by Keith Rosen. Reprinted with permission by Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Release Date, January, 2007. Visit www.guidetoclosingthesale.com.

Lacking some confidence? Do you suffer from low self-esteem? As you can imagine, there’s no room at the champion roundtable for doubt or anything less than a winning attitude. So, how do these top producers do it? How do so many of them go from initially lacking the confidence to sell or close a deal to an extreme abundance of self worth?

Here’s the secret to boosting your confidence today; make confidence a choice. Wait, I know what you may be thinking; it sounds too easy. It has to be more difficult than this. Well, it depends upon the foundation and the strategy in which you’re using to build your confidence. Here’s one story that will introduce you to a whole new set of tools to do so; starting with choice.

“So, I guess you could sense a change in the tone of my prep form that I sent you for our sales coaching call today?”

It was Denise calling in for her 7 A.M. coaching call. Prior to each coaching call, clients email me their objectives for the call and their week in review. This way, they stay focused, accountable to their commitments and have the opportunity to celebrate their wins each week.

She was right. “If you are referring to the sentence where you wrote, ‘I feel like getting out of sales completely and getting a mindless job somewhere else, maybe the government,’ or the sentence, ‘maybe I’m not cut out for this’ then yes, I do sense something else may be off here.”

Denise and I have been working together for about seven months now. She’s made incredible breakthroughs in both her performance and her attitude. As a result, she was offered a promotion from Regional Sales Manager to National Account Manager. With this promotion came a territory change as well as a new type of prospect. Where her average sale used to be about $10,000 – $20,000, now her average sale was approximately $250,000.

“What caused this sudden change in attitude?” I inquired.

“Well, you know how we’ve been talking about the prospects that I’ve been filling in my pipeline? At this point in time, many of those prospects should be converting into sales. So, I started making my follow up calls as scheduled. Nothing but “Call me next week” or “Now’s not a good time” or “If you would like to leave a message…”

“I guess you could say that I’m getting a bit antsy. I want some of these deals to close already so that I can post some positive sales numbers towards my quota. As you can probably hear, I’m a little nervous. What if these deals don’t close?”

“You tell me, Denise. What if these deals don’t close?”

“I can tell you this, Keith. It won’t be a good thing! Maybe I never should have taken this national account position. I knew it was going to be a big change from regional sales but I didn’t anticipate such a change in the length of my sales cycle.”

“Maybe?” Am I sensing some doubt in you?” I asked curiously?

“Oh, absolutely,” Denise exclaimed.

“And what, may I ask, are you doubting?” I responded.

“Myself,” Denise said quietly in a deflated voice. I could hear her confidence waning. It was as if someone reached inside her soul and ripped all of the self worth out of her.

She continued, “And I know it’s just a matter of time until Lewis, you know, my boss, calls me with some bad news like, ‘Denise. We really expected a lot more out of you. We thought you’d be much further along than you are. Denise, your fired’!”

I always find it amazing how creative our minds can be when it comes to visualizing our consequences and fears.

I shifted gears. “Denise, I’m curious about something. Didn’t you recently start this position?”

“Yes, about 4 months ago.”

“And isn’t it true that you’ve already closed and up-sold some big accounts?

Well, yeah but that was like a month ago and I haven’t sold anything since. Besides it…

Before the next excuse came out, I interrupted with, “And isn’t it also true that you’ve gotten at least two deliberate and intentional accolades from both your new boss and his boss about how thrilled they are with what you have done so far?”

Silence.

“I’m sorry, Denise, but can you speak up a bit. I wasn’t able to hear you,” I said sarcastically, yet in a way that still made Denise feel empowered and supported.

“Denise, what are you hearing in what I’ve just shared with you?” I asked.

“That maybe I’m being a bit too hard on myself,” she reluctantly admitted.

“Does that feel true for you?” I reconfirmed.

“No, Keith, this is right on the money.”

“Well, are you ready to hear a little more that may also be right on the money but just a bigger pile of money?”

“Hit me!” She exclaimed. “I’m ready for it.”

Fueling Self Doubt

I continued. “You had mentioned that you confidence, your self worth, your self esteem, however you want to refer to it has been deflated as a result of what you perceive as low productivity. Because you haven’t brought in any new sales recently, you doubt yourself and your abilities. Is that accurate so far?”

“Yup.”

“So, can I then conclude that you measure your self worth by what you produce? That is, if you are closing new business practically each week, then your confidence would skyrocket to an all time high.”

“That is for sure!” Denise exclaimed.

“Conversely, where you feel like you are now, where you haven’t sold, it’s affecting your confidence and the faith you have in yourself.”

“No question there.”

“Denise, what does the word ‘confidence’ mean to you?”

I could hear her thinking. “I don’t know. I guess confidence means being in control. It’s when I have control over something. It’s a feeling of control and a belief in what I can do,” she replied.

“So, in essence you are only worth as much as you’ve sold recently? Wow! That must be an interesting roller coaster ride of emotion you’re on.”

“You can say that again, Keith!”

I continued. “So basically, if you sell, you’re feeling great. You’re in a positive state of mind. You are in a good mood and feeling a strong sense of worth about yourself. Conversely, if you don’t sell or don’t get the appointment or get in touch with a certain prospect that you’ve been attempting to connect with, you’re feeling pretty lousy about the day and about yourself. Denise, is this strategy of yours working for you?”

“Well,” Denise began, “I don’t know if it would necessarily say this is working for me. After all, it’s certainly causing way too much stress, anxiety and overwhelm. And it also keeps me from enjoying my family and maintaining my peace of mind.”

“So, would you be open to hearing what I’m seeing and a new way of thinking that would remove your self doubt as well as the stress that follows, permanently so that you can start enjoying your life more?” I inquired, getting permission to continue our conversation and share some truths with her that I see.

“C’mon, Keith. We’ve been down this road before. Just lay it on me. I’m open to another way of thinking if it’s going to keep me sane, happy and employed.”

“Of course. Consider this; do not allow external situations to dictate your internal condition.”

“Wow, that’s heavy. Is this another Keithism?”

I smiled, “Let me explain. You mentioned earlier that confidence is a belief in yourself. Where do we adopt these beliefs we have about ourselves? From our experiences and from other people. At some point during our life we learned the wrong lesson based on an experience we had. And the lesson was, if you want to be successful you need to acquire things. You need to prove yourself and your self worth. And those things you can acquire can be anything from money, cars, homes, toys, clothes, and in this case, sales because if we acquire these things, if we create these things or work hard to achieve them, then we will be successful based on our current definition of success. And if we’re successful we’ve proven ourselves. And if we’ve proven ourselves then boy won’t our level of confidence continue to rise.
Tip From Your Executive Sales Coach:
Let your peace of mind, happiness, confidence and self worth be a choice you make consciously, rather than surrendering your power by allowing external situations to dictate your internal condition for you.
Now, keep in mind, based on this model, your level of self worth and confidence has become conditional. That is, it goes up and down depending upon on what you’ve achieved or produced rather than what is truly important; who you are.”

“That’s pretty much true for me.” Denise said.

Make Confidence a Choice

Conversely, what if we don’t allow external situations to dictate our internal condition? What if your confidence is, simply just a choice you make about yourself? A belief in yourself?

Let me say this in a different way. What if you could choose to be confident, choose to have faith in yourself and adopt an unwavering belief in your abilities, regardless of the outcomes of each day? Consider for a moment that you have already proven yourself and all of your future accomplishments are achieved as an expression of what you value or the value you want to deliver to others.

If you can believe in this, your confidence now becomes unconditional as it is now based on who you are and the quality of the person you are, not simply what you do or what you produce.

The value you deliver isn’t only reflected in the number of sales you make. Your value isn’t what you do, but who you are and the quality of person you have become and are continually evolving into. Who you are is consistent, who you are is a choice, who you are is something you control 100 percent. That’s why who you are is always more important than what you do.

That’s why the true definition of confidence is having an unwavering faith or belief not only in yourself but in each experience you have. And that belief is this; regardless of the situation, regardless of how bleak it may look or difficult it may be, it will all work out in the end without the evidence to support it. It’s trusting in yourself without any proof to back up your conviction.”

“Hmm, interesting,” Denise said after a few moments. “I can see how this makes sense but you can’t sit there and tell me that your attitude doesn’t change when you’re making sales each week!”

“I can certainly understand that Denise, and you are right. For most salespeople, meeting or exceeding your sales goals has a very clear and measurable effect on their attitude.
However, like most people would agree, the feeling of satisfaction you experience from closing the sale does not last. Conversely, it is fleeting until the next sale.”

And, doesn’t this support your old model of thinking? You’re putting yourself back into the confidence trap, surrendering your ability to control your level of self worth by choice and instead, allowing your experiences to dictate how you feel about yourself.”

Challenge your way of thinking and let your confidence be a choice based on an unwavering belief in yourself and in your abilities without needing the evidence to support it.

Unlearn What You’ve Learned

Nov 7, 2006 All About Selling, Business Advice, How To Sell and Sales Tips, How to Manage Your Team, Sales Coaching, Sales Management

Here’s a story I’m certain you’ll find entertaining as it relates to learning the wrong lessons about what it takes to close a sale.

I had just completed a keynote presentation in Manhattan on the topics of prospecting and the art of delivering powerful presentations. Being someone who embraces learning as a lifestyle, I’m always interested in receiving feedback from my audience. And, like I typically do at the end of every seminar I deliver, I graciously requested that each person take a moment to complete the evaluation form on the last page of the handbook I created for them. As they were completing their evaluations, I began packing up my bag to head home. A group of people approached me after my seminar with some questions.

By the time I finished coaching them around their biggest sales challenges, the majority of the audience had made their way out of the auditorium. I began walking through the auditorium, collecting the remaining evaluation forms that people left on their chairs. A young woman approached me and asked if I had a moment to talk. “Of course,” I responded genuinely.

Her name was Lucy. She was a recent college graduate and had just changed jobs, taking a sales position with a jewelry design company in Manhattan.

“First, I have to thank you so much for your seminar. It was absolutely fantastic and exactly what I needed to hear.”

“Well, thank you so much for your kind words, Lucy. It sounds as if we both got what we needed to hear today,” I responded smiling.

“No Keith, you don’t understand,” Lucy said. “Do you want to know how I was trained in my first sales job right out of college? You wouldn’t believe it.”

Lucy continued, “It was my fist job as a salesperson. I’ve never sold anything before. I got a job working for a well known and well respected jewelry designer in California. During the interviewing process, the owner of the company told me they would provide sales training, which was something I clearly expressed that I definitely needed.

Well, it’s the first day on the job. As part of my training, I was scheduled to meet with my sales manager and spend the day with him. What an experience. We spent about half the day together, going from one appointment to the next. This provided me with the opportunity to learn more about the company and silently observe his style of selling to see how a sales call should be conducted.

When we got back to the office, I thought we would take some time to review what had occurred throughout the day. You know, go over each sales call and discuss what happened so that I could learn from them. Afterwards, I figured we would do more one to one training. Well, that wasn’t exactly what happened.

Instead, he takes a DVD out from his desk drawer. It was the movie, Glengarry Glen Ross.” (I must say, it’s a fabulous movie with an all star cast including Alec “Second prize, steak knives!” Baldwin, Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin and Kevin Spacey.) “Here, take this movie. Watch and study this movie and the salespeople in it a few times when you go home tonight,” he ordered. “This movie will teach you everything you will ever need to know about selling and how to sell.” Oy.

(If you want to see some examples of what not to do when selling and closing, there are several classic and entertaining movies that tell different stories about salespeople and their struggles to close the big deal. Aside from Glengarry Glen Ross, some other movies are Tin Men, Boiler Room, Cadillac Man, Death of a Salesman, The Big Kahuna.)

While this sales manager’s “training program” may be more of an exception than the norm, the unfortunate truth is, the norm isn’t that far removed from how this sales manager trains his salespeople.

Here’s a very safe bet. Whether you’re a manager or a salesperson; don’t rely on the company to provide you with the tools, training, support and coaching you need to succeed in your position and in your career. Just ask any top producer and they will tell you they did not rely solely on the annual Sales Conference or weekly meeting for developing the skills and strategies needed to become a sales champion.

Ultimately, it’s your responsibility to find the resources, guidance and the support you need to achieve your career goals. And if you are fortunate enough to work for a company who offers some type of training, continue to challenge what you learn, as well as your own conventional wisdom and beliefs, to ensure you don’t continually learn the wrong lessons.