What is motivation?
Why is it necessary?
Why is it temporary?
Is there any way to make motivation permanent?
Those four questions will keep you thinking for a very long time – or until your brain begins to freeze like that feeling you get when taking the first sip of a frozen margarita! 🙂
So grab a glass and consider how those questions impact your future.
If you are a sales professional, how many times over your career have you found yourself in a position where you had the knowledge and skill set needed to exceed any goal – and yet you found yourself not taking the actions needed to bring that target into fruition?
If you are a sales leader or business owner, how many times have you seen a sales person that seemed to have everything going for them? There should be no way that that person should have been anything other than hugely successful. But yet, their performance was mediocre at best.
Many times when we see those traits in our sales team we tend to dismiss the person quickly with phrases such as, “They have no work ethic.” Or, “They had call reluctance so profound that they could not overcome it.” Or maybe you perceive those traits in yourself and you are thinking, “maybe I am just not meant for sales.”
I want to challenge your thinking today.
Ask yourself, is a lack of work ethic the real issue? In previous positions, have you shown a great work ethic where you demonstrated your desire and commitment to do everything in your power to accomplish your goal? If you are a sales leader, did you inquire with the candidate’s previous employers during the interview process? There had to be something positive that you saw or you would not have recruited them.
You may find that the real issue is a lack of motivation – or the existence of only temporary motivation. And that missing motivation is masking itself as a lack of work ethic or a high amount of call reluctance.
The majority of work that you do in life is based on effort, physical resistance, accomplishment and reward. You put forth the effort. Your body experiences physical resistance to the effort. You continue the effort until the result is achieved. Then you receive the reward for your work.[lightbox link=”http://jeffcwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/effort-2.jpg” thumb=”http://jeffcwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/effort-2.jpg” width=”300″ align=”right” title=”effort 2″ frame=”true” icon=”image” caption=””]
But in sales, there is an added element involved. You still must put forth effort and overcome the physical resistance to do the activities. However, between physical resistance and accomplishment comes something I will call external negative feedback. We hear “no” quite often. And that external negative feedback is often like a group of mountain climbers getting hit by a snowstorm.
External negative feedback is why success in sales cannot solely depend on a mathematical expectation.
Instead, it requires motivation. More importantly, it requires that we understand motivation and how to manager ours.
More tomorrow.
QUESTION: If you took the rejection out of sales, how many people would be successful?
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