Motivation: A Motive to Action. We have to acquire it, develop it, demonstrate it and even write letters based on it when applying for jobs, but how many of us truly realise and believe that motivation is a two-way street? It really has to come from within as well as from external stimuli.

Perhaps you’ve been trained to use the telephone in business by someone who exudes enthusiasm, brims with bonhomie or has the gift of the gab. You may leave feeling inferior (“that could never be me”) or you could leave the room walking on air, feeling indestructible… until of course the real world serves you yet more resistant prospects. It’s at this point that you realise, having scaled new heights of motivation, you’ve further to fall than before.

Help is at hand. Cold calling is a solo activity but you don’t have to face it alone. It can be a game and there should be a fun side to it. This doesn’t mean we let our professional standards slip, on the contrary, but we should be entitled to preserve our emotional well-being, secure in our identity being separate from our role in life: I’m OK, you’re OK.

For it’s at the point when a person’s identity and role are no longer distinct from one another that sales managers and mentors often go around “blowing up balloons”, pumping their salespeople’s self image and ego with pep talk and positivity, only to realise they’ll have to do it again before too long. The motivation for the salesperson to carry out their role is all coming from the sales manager (external), and not from the salesperson (internal). You can be sure their identity is suffering with beliefs like “I’m a poor salesperson” taking hold. 

Who taught us that getting a “yes” was the only outcome worth having in the noble profession of sales? Whatever happened to “we learn more from our failures than our successes?” Thomas Edison and even babies learning to walk, either don’t know any better or just keep on going until outcomes improve enough.  

Today, more than ever, time seems not to be on our side. Life is somehow more impatient, less forgiving. We need to increase our speed to results, to “hit the ground running” and we worry about the pressure of performing to big targets. Just think, if we all had several million in the bank, would we worry about calling anyone? No.

So, learn to dial like you don’t need the money and motivate yourself to the next million. If you won’t, someone will… and remember, prospects can smell desperate salespeople. That’s not you today, is it?

Copyright: Shaun Gisbourne 2009

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