Give Yourself the Hard Sell
If you have never read my fellow blogger Bill Farquharson, you should. He writes "The Sales Challenge" blog right here on PIworld. And, he has a company called Aspire For that boasts thousands of satisfied sales reps it has made stronger, better, more effective reps.
On his Website, he has “borrowed” a clip from A League of Their Own in which the Tom Hanks' character is asking Geena Davis' character why she quit the team right before the championship. She says, “It just got too hard.” And he replies, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
The reason that Bill has this clip on his Website—dedicated to making you a better sales rep—is because it is exactly true for us in print sales. It IS really hard. And that is why not everyone does it. It’s true of sales in general, but today, I think it is ESPECIALLY true for us in print and communications.
So I want us to really reflect on that for a moment. I want us all to really stop and give ourselves some credit. What we do every day is extremely challenging, and it changes every day. Every day we are faced with new technological obstacles and competition from some new and unanticipated source.
However, every day we can get a little bit stronger. Each day we can take advantage of an opportunity to make ourselves better, to work a little harder, to push ourselves to make just one more call, to dig just a little deeper and ask just a little bit more of ourselves.
You probably have a lot of friends who have jobs they go to each day and they bring home the same paycheck a couple of times a month. You might even allow yourselves to be jealous of those friends sometimes. Their pay doesn’t fluctuate with what seems to be the whim of an ever-changing industry. They get to stay inside where it’s warm when it’s 20 below, and cool when it’s 101. But what do you have that they don’t?
- Categories:
- Business Management - Marketing/Sales
Blogger, author, consultant, coach and all around evangelist for the graphic arts industry, Kelly sold digital printing for 15 years so she understands the challenges, frustrations and pitfalls of building a successful sales practice. Her mission is to help printers of all sizes sell more stuff. Kelly's areas of focus include sales and marketing coaching, enabling clients to find engagement strategies that work for them and mentoring the next generation of sales superstars.
Kelly graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Political Science and, among other notable accomplishments, co-founded the Windy City Rollers, a professional women's roller derby league. She is also the mother of two sets of twins under the age of ten, so she fears nothing.
