SELF DEFEAT IS THE WORST DEFEAT

Like most men and women in sales, the competition and is one of the things that drives us the hardest and motivates us to do more every day. None of like to be beaten, however most of us appreciate a good hard fought battle and can accept being beaten fairly and squarely by another rep.

There is a time that we hate being beaten, a time that we find it very hard to accept defeat, and a time when we want to give ourselves a swift kick in the… let’s just say rear end.

The time I am talking about is when we defeat ourselves by not doing what we know we should have done. This has happened to almost every one of us at one time or another. We get mentally lazy or in some cases physically lazy. We know we should do something but we get over confident or just sloppy in our work and we don’t do it. We lose not because the competition does something right, but because we do something wrong.

I am guessing you could write a book about how reps have defeated themselves every week. You could make a movie about all the things reps do to undermine their success. You could fill an iPod with the stories of unfulfilled promises made by reps every day.

When these things happen there is no one to blame, no one to point a finger at, and no one to make excuses about. The enemy is the person looking back at you in the mirror and he or she is a formidable opponent.

So what can we do to keep ourselves from shooting ourselves in the foot? THINK! That’s right, THINK before you talk, THINK before you do anything. THINK before you decide not to do something. THINK, THINK again, and then THINK once more. If we will all make an effort to THINK about every action we take or decide not to take during a sales presentation we will stop most of the self defeating actions and words we use.

Thinking doesn’t always assure success, and I am by no means saying that if you THINK you will close every sale. What will happen is you will stop losing sales to your own poor judgment. Customers will need to make good business based decisions. Our competitors will need to step up and sell not just show up and not screw up.

I know that I can stand toe to toe and win against just about any competitor I have ever come up against. The one sales rep that beats me every time is me when I make mistakes.

Lorin