What do you stand for?
What are your values? What is your philosophy? How do you want to be described by others?
The best sales professionals are the ones who can answer these questions. In fact, they can answer these questions in exactly the same way they would respond whether talking about their professional life or their personal life. There is no distinction, for example, between “my values” and “my values in selling.”
Unfortunately, too many sellers are unable to articulate what they stand for, what their values are or what their own philosophy is when it comes to selling. It may be easy to do for the other parts of their lives, but they’ve somehow compartmentalized selling and operate with a different set of values and philosophies.
When I ask sellers these questions, the answers often relate to sales commissions. I ask “what’s your sales philosophy?” and they say “I do whatever it takes to make the sale and pay the bills.” Or I ask “how do you want to be described by others?” and they tell me they’d like to be described as being at the top of the leaderboard, in the President’s Club, or as “blowing out their quotas.”
What’s happening here is that some sales professionals are being defined by the sales productivity drivers their companies put in place. These directional tools are replacing the moral compass that every seller should bring to the job.
No number – not goals, quotas, dashboard metrics, comparisons or performance indicators – should define who you are as a seller. These are simply numbers, guideposts to help you see where you are and where you are expected to be.
When sellers sacrifice themselves and allow these numbers to define them, they become the automatons that buyers resist. They devalue themselves by making bad judgment calls as they churn and burn with a short-term outlook. They don’t respect themselves and, in some cases, may even lose themselves in the process.
When you know your values and your philosophy, you should show up in every sales engagement with those beliefs absolutely and firmly in place. You don’t need to set them aside in order to make a sale. Instead, you will make more sales when you are true to who you are and what you believe.
