So you think you can sell?

Nearly every sales professional that I have ever met, trained or coached wholeheartedly believes that they have mastered the art of selling. Unfortunately, the reality is that professional selling is a complex balance of skills, knowledge and experience that very few within this profession ever master (i.e. <1%).

However, there are at least three fundamental rules that every sales professional must incorporate into his or her philosophy if they are to transform their daily effort into a sustainable and successful career:

1. Value your time as if it were your client's - Most sales professionals have never worked through an exercise designed to quantify the value of their time and therefore find themselves investing countless hours investing potentially productive time into less than productive pursuits (i.e. redundant internal meetings, responding to unqualified RFIs, etc.).
   
   MTM's recommendation? Identify the value of your time (i.e. $100/hour? $200/hour?) and subsequently observe how easy it becomes to prioritize where you will invest your time on any given day.
   
   
2. Learn to effectively qualify your customers - The most underdeveloped skill in the world of professional selling is that of customer qualification (i.e. probing for the client's need, budgetary capacity, etc.) and therefore most sales professionals invest their time pursuing opportunities that are highly unlikely to progress in their favor.
   
   MTM's recommendation? Seek professional instruction from a reputable source that has had consistent success with progressing through a sales cycle.
   
   
3. Accept that there is a time to cut bait - The most difficult decision a sales professional will ever have to make is to walk away from an opportunity before the sales cycle is complete. However, the reality is that if the sales professional is following a disciplined process, they will have all the information they require to make a timely (and economical) decision to withdraw from an ill-fated pursuit.
   
   MTM's recommendation? Develop, implement and trust a disciplined sales process that is designed to take the emotion out of the decision as to when to reinvest your valuable time elsewhere.

My personal experience has been that if a sales professional adopts these three relatively simple rules into their day-to-day approach, their productivity and consistency will increase by a factor of no less than ten. The trick, of course, is convincing people in this particular profession to acknowledge that there may indeed be ways to improve or refine an approach that may have worked on occasion in the past.