Money Maker #121 You will never experience or achieve what you can’t imagine yourself achieving.

Vision, The Number One Controlling Factor for Success
Your vision of yourself, your life and what it can be is the number one factor controlling how you will do in life. Just as our lack of vision and imagination can limit us, they can free and enable us. Big vision, big motivation, big imagination, equals big results. “Walk like a king, you’re a king” goes the saying. This is true for all of us. “If you think you can or think you can’t you’re probably right.” Working with your personal vision is not only telling yourself you can, but also telling yourself you can, Big. Don’t let others limit you. But more importantly, don’t limit yourself.

Work. Health. Wealth. Family.

What is your vision? Write it out to move to the next stage of your life. Give yourself a vision to aspire to, and you will be on the way towards that next stage. If you do not give yourself a new vision, you are on your way to being stuck where you are. Winners take control and responsibility for how they are doing. Losers do nothing and blame their lack of results on the world.

Money Maker #13, Having a well thought out, powerful and inspirational response to the question “Why Should I Buy from You?” is one of the keys to professional selling.

In the book, “Sweaty Palms, the Neglected Art of Being Interviewed,” the author, Anthony H. Medley, gives many strategies on how to interview well, but the most important is to have an answer to the question, “Why should we hire you?” He points out that your interviewer may never ask that question directly, but there will always be an opportunity to give your answer to that question. If your answer is powerful and inspirational you will get the job.

The same is true for the response to the question, “Why should I buy from you?” A great answer to this question will overcome many objections. “I don’t need any new suppliers.” “I don’t buy from brokers.” “I’ve already got twenty guys calling me.” These and many other objections can be handled by a well thought out answer to, “Why should I buy from you?” As with the job interview, your potential customers will probably not ask you this question directly, but many of their objections will be overcome with a planned response to this question.

Money Maker #84: All the sales skill in the world will not save you if you do not understand your fellow man.

Technique is useless without feeling. People will not buy from you because you are a great salesperson. They will buy from you because you are a great person. People will not buy from you because of how much you know, they will buy from you because of how much you care about them and relate to them.

Understanding our own personality type and that of our customers will greatly enhance our ability to sell. In addition to making our selling efforts more profitable, it will make selling less stressful and more enjoyable on a daily basis.

When I first started selling I sold everyone the same way. In fact, I tried to force all my customers to buy from me the way I wanted to sell. This was a disaster. I made a decent living, mainly because I worked hard, but many of my peers doubled and tripled my income. This was tough on my ego, but the numbers were the numbers, and I had to live with them.

When I finally understood that there were different ways to approach people and began to apply these different approaches, my selling career took off and selling became much less stressful and more fun.

Part of what makes selling difficult for some of us is that we have to come to terms with our own personality. We have to look at ourselves and think about how our personalities affect our fellow man. Believe it or not, there are things about our personalities that other people do not like at worst, or at best, make them uncomfortable.

People are not receptive and are not going to buy anything from someone who makes them feel uncomfortable, so learning how to control some of our natural tendencies that irritate some personality types will help us sell more lumber.