My Three Keys to Success
Success means different things to different people. In fact, my definition of that word has changed drastically through the years, as I’m sure it has, or will, for you!
Whether your definition of success is earning a bunch of money, or being able to take pride in a job well done, these three keys to success will at least get you on the right track. I’m sorry to tell you, but the titles of each section are going to sound very elementary and obvious. The problem is, I cannot tell you how many salespeople I have worked with, or seen in action, who do not use these three keys, and no, they don’t sell nearly as well as I do.
So, if you want to turn your sales job into a fulfilling career, or just want to improve on your salesmanship in general, this short article will help you do exactly that.
ALWAYS BE ON TIME… ALWAYS
This isn’t the little leagues anymore. If you want to impress people and build trusting relationships, you need to work on your punctuality. If you are already good about your time management, then that’s great too. But, I’d be willing to bet you can improve, even just a little.
My rule of thumb for punctuality is, “if you’re 15 minutes early, you’re already late.”
No, I’m not trying to be “cute” or comical. When you plan to meet or call someone at a specific date and time, you want to get there as early as you possibly can, without being intrusive. As a matter of fact, I am writing this article while sitting in my car outside of a truck stop diner waiting for my customer to arrive. We agreed to meet at the restaurant at 10:00 am, and I arrived at quarter past nine.
Does the customer know that I arrived almost an hour early? Probably not, but that’s not the only reason for showing up early. Since I am not at my desk, and I had to drive two hours to meet the customer, that means I am not monitoring my inbox as closely as I would if I were in my office. By arriving 45 minutes early to this meeting, I was able to check my inbox, respond to a few emails, make some phone calls, and get started on this article before my day actually begins.
If the customer knew I was this early that may impress them, sure. Maybe. But like I said, that’s only half the reason for being so early. The other half is to be sure you are just as productive while not in the office as you would be IN the office. With a few exceptions, not being physically in your office should NEVER be an excuse for not being able to service your customers properly. And yes, I have plenty of advice for working effectively when having to work outside of your usual office space.
Being an hour early is sort of like doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. You will not necessarily get recognition from anyone, but you will know you were there early, and I promise you that being more productive while away from the office pays off in ways that many salespeople fail to understand.
ALWAYS TAKE PRIDE IN ANYTHING YOU DO
When you look at a piece of work, or watch an online video, or even read an email from a colleague, you can immediately tell how much effort they put into it. Or, worse yet, how much effort they did NOT put into it.
The point is, the appearance and craftsmanship of any task is a direct reflection of the person who completed the task. So, what do you want your work to say about you?
If you’re like me, you want your work to say, “I am the best at what I do, and you’ve made a great decision to do business with me.” I want my work to appear as great as I want my customer to feel when they receive whichever email, proposal,or training video they asked for.
This doesn’t always have to be about your work as a salesperson, however. Improving your salesmanship is certainly the main point of my work, but this particular key to success can be applied to all facets of life.
Or, if you are reading this because you are thinking about getting into sales, and you want to know what it takes to succeed, this can apply to you just as well!
Let me tell you what this key means to me, personally.
Before I got into sales, I was employed at a local machine shop called Lentros Engineering. I would work there after school, during school vacations, after half days, and especially if I were asked to work Saturdays. I just wanted to work and make money, and that’s what I did!
I started at Lentros as the high school kid who swept the floors after school. If you’ve never been inside of a machine shop, let me tell you, they can get rather filthy during the day. Not to get into the specifics, but if a shop is ISO:9001 certified, then it’s going to be relatively clean around work benches, but you just can’t prevent metal chips and coolant oil from getting all over the floors.
That meant that there was ALWAYS plenty of sweeping to be done every day. I was never without something to do, at first.
On my first full day at Lentros (school vacation day), the shop manager showed me where he wanted me to begin. He walked me behind this centuries-old looking CNC machine and pointed at the ground. The only thing he said to me was, “careful behind here, there is a lot of oil on the ground and it can get very slippery.” No truer words had ever been spoken. Not only was the floor saturated in this peculiar looking oil, but there was what appeared to be kitty litter and aluminum shavings all over the place. In some spots, I swear it was ankle deep!
Okay, that was an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
Thinking this mess would take me all day, my manager told me to let him know if I needed anything, and walked back to the front office.
I grabbed the broom, cranked up my iPod, and got to work.
After I swept up everything I could, I looked at the area I had been tasked to clean, and I wasn’t satisfied with what I saw. Sure, it looked much better than it did when I started, but if I were paying someone to do that job, I would not be pleased if they were to have left it like that, thinking they had completed the job.
I was not proud of the results at that point.
It was the oil that was the biggest problem. My job was to sweep the floor, sweep up the metal chips, and you simply cannot sweep oil off the ground.
I walked over to the machinist closest to me and introduced myself. I asked them where I would be able to find a mop, and they walked me over to the wash basin and mop area.
Forget what I said about sweeping oil off the ground. Mopping oil off the ground is not the easiest thing either! I had to empty and fill the mop bucket at least half a dozen times before I was able to call it a job well done.
After the mopping was done, I swept the area once more just to get everything I could off the floor. I also rearranged a few small things to make the area look a lot neater than it had been when I got there.
Even with all the extra work I willingly did, the job didn’t take nearly as long as either I or my manager had anticipated. When I told him I had finished, their eyes almost rolled out the door. Because of how quickly it was finished I could tell they were expecting to walk over there and find the area somehow messier than it was before.
They were wrong.
All I did was do the job to the best of my ability, and didn’t stop until I felt proud of what I had done. Proud to present my work to my customer (coworkers can be considered customers as well. I cover topics like that during one-on-ones). That’s all I did! That’s it! But they were absolutely shocked at how well the area looked. I’m not joking, they actually called a few of the machinists over to look at how great the floor looked. One even said, “wow, I forgot the floor was actually blue.”
By now, hopefully it isn’t a shock when I tell you that I moved up through that company at the speed of light. Within three weeks of sweeping floors, I was given the opportunity to actually work on the parts that the machinists made all day! When I left Lentros Engineering, I was actually one of those “machinists” I mentioned several times in this article.
I repeated the same process when I was hired at Precision Digital Corporation. I went from answering price and delivery calls to representing the company at trade shows and giving live presentations to distributors within six months of being hired.
And guess what? I still take pride in anything I do. Whether I’m typing a simple email, or giving a presentation to a room full of salespeople, I refuse to deliver mediocre work.
ALWAYS GIVE 110%
You may be thinking this key is the same as the last one. You aren’t wrong, they are very similar, but they are not the same.
Giving 110% quite literally means going above and beyond. It means delivering work that exceeds the customer’s expectations, or includes valuable items the customer hadn’t thought to specify.
An extremely simple version of this goes back to my first days at Precision Digital when I was just answering phones and transferring them to the correct person. If the customer needed something that was simple enough for me to do, then I would just do it instead of passing them off to someone else.
Aside from price and delivery, order status is the most common reason somebody calls the customer service line at Precision Digital. After a while, I realized that when you tell a customer that their order has already shipped, they ask a few follow up questions. They would ask which day the order shipped, how it shipped (UPS Ground, 2-Day Air, etc.), and ask for the tracking number.
Once I picked up on that, I would offer up all of that information to a customer when they asked for their order status, even before they requested it. This works especially well when the customer emails you for their order status. Any time somebody sent me that request, I would quite literally answer them with something like:
Hi Customer,
Your order, PO: 1234, shipped out yesterday, 3/11/21 via UPS Ground.
According to the UPS website, it is scheduled to arrive tomorrow, 3/13/21 by end of day.
If you need anything else, just let me know!
I know, that email is extremely formal, almost robotic. But there is nothing inherently wrong with that (this is very literally how I respond to those types of requests, and yes, I can offer proof if need be). I gave them all of the information they could possibly need in regard to that order. I told them when it shipped, how it shipped, confirmed the dates, and when it is scheduled to arrive.
What does this do for your customer?
This allows your customer to have all the information about their order without having to email you several more times asking for the additional information. It’s almost like the customer is speaking in shorthand. If they ask you for the tracking, they are actually asking when their order shipped, and when it’s going to arrive. So, you anticipate their needs, and provide them more information than they say they need!
This allows the customer to better communicate deliveries with their customer, or project engineers who need the parts. Because they are probably responsible for ontime deliveries, they will appreciate the fact that they got everything they could need with one email.
What does this do for you?
First and foremost, you made the customer happy. Since you saved them time and effort, you also saved yourself some time and effort by offering all the information in one shot. More importantly, this tells your customer that you respect their time, you understand their needs, and that you care about customer experience. All of this is what you need to help build trusting business relationships with people.
Now take that same example, but this time the customer is calling because their order has yet to arrive. Generally speaking these can be tense moments because a late order usually means somebody else is going to be yelling at the person who is calling you.
For the sake of this example, let’s just say your company shipped the order on time and it’s the shipping company that has delayed everything.
Well, guess what? It doesn’t really matter who is at fault. All your customer knows is that their order is late, and that means some discomfort for them in one way or another. This is where you need to go above and beyond to create the best customer experience.
If you try saying it’s not your fault, or there is nothing you can do, or try to somehow tell the customer, “too bad, so sad”, then you are going to get an extremely negative reaction from them, especially if they already seem upset about the order being late in the first place.
You should say, “you’re absolutely right, and this is unacceptable. The order already shipped so I cannot get it to you any faster, but I can refund you for the shipping charges for any inconvenience this may cause you.”
Just like the previous example, they are going to ask follow up questions. So, you need to give them 110% effort and anticipate those questions. One of those questions will inevitably be them asking you to pay for the shipping charges.
Beat them to it. Save them some time and effort, and just offer to have the company pay for the shipping. They will be more than pleased with that answer, and how you handled the situation in general. Don’t worry about the money. If something is shipping UPS ground, depending on the size and weight of your product, it’s not going to be very expensive. It will certainly be less expensive than treating a customer poorly and risk having them take their business elsewhere.
Those are just two examples of how this key can help you be successful in sales, or in any profession if applied correctly, but there are so many other examples which are not covered in this article. If you want to brainstorm some other ways this key can be applied to sales, feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn.
CONCLUSION
If I could teach you how to be successful in less than 5,000 words, I would. The truth is, I simply can’t tell you how to become an instant success in a short article. To be brutally honest, I probably couldn’t do it with a novel either. Not even a Stephen King sized novel!
That doesn’t mean I can’t teach you how to be successful, but the most effective results come from one-on-one conversations. Actually, I like to think of them as brainstorming sessions.
I cannot tell you that I have all the answers. But what I can promise you is, together, we will find all the answers. Being good at sales isn’t about the latest buzzwords or the magical phrases. It isn’t about fancy cologne, a box of donuts for your customer at a morning meeting, or even how well you know your product. It’s about how well you treat people, how disciplined you are, and always being on time while taking pride in anything you do, and giving everyone you interact with 110%.
Reach out to me on LinkedIn and schedule a time for a brainstorming session!
I use GoToMeeting as a video call platform, and it will not cost you anything to join the call. In fact, if you know any other salespeople who could benefit from a brainstorming session with me, you can invite them along as well! (Limited to 20 attendees)
