How To Enjoy Your Work

” Passion for your work, a pervasive commitment to quality, and relentless attention to details are essential markers of excellence. Quality work and an appreciation for the importance of details benefit not just the clients a business serves; these attitudes and habits also bring joy and peace of mind to the person who delivers the work. To know how to do something exceptionally well is to enjoy it. “Everything Counts: 52 Remarkable Ways to Inspire Excellence and Drive Results by Gary Ryan Blair

Sales can be a tough career.

We face rejection daily, doing most of our presenting in unfamiliar territory. We know that we are only as good as our last order, meaning that if we don’t sell, we don’t eat. And like every other ‘civilian’ we have bills to pay. On days without results (most days for many) it can be extremely stressful.

There can be no doubt that selling is not for everybody. In fact, many experts estimate that 80 percent of people employed as salespeople are in the wrong career. They lack the temperament for Sales.

What must life be for the mediocre salesperson? Every day they must wonder whether this is the day they will be asked to leave. To them, rejection must cut like a knife.

I knew one salesperson who was on the verge of bankruptcy. She had spent weeks putting a sale together – a double header with a fee of $16,000. She needed the money desperately. Everything was agreed. The buyer had signed and she only needed the owners’ signatures.

The sale was nearly complete. But we know that you cannot eat ‘nearly’. Right at the eleventh hour, the owners said to the salesperson, “We are sorry to put you to all this trouble, but we have decided not to sell“. The salesperson told me later that it was all she could do not to burst into tears in front of those sellers. Desperate salespeople don’t sell too well and I felt desperately sorry for her.

I mentioned earlier that I believe the figures which state that 80 percent of salespeople are in the wrong career. But I also believe that many of these ‘Eighty Percenters‘ could develop their temperaments for Sales if only they would do things differently.

By differently, I mean stop doing the same things over and over again, when you know they don’t work. Stop doing what doesn’t work and start doing things that do:

• Study your craft – get better at it.
• Set goals – and aim high.
• Calculate targets needed to reach those goals.
• Plan and then follow that plan.
• Increase your activity – speak with more people. Prospecting is NOT a dirty word!
• Develop an eye for detail. Strive to do things properly the first time.

Show me one Eighty Percenter who religiously follows these steps. You won’t find any. But it is this failure to do things properly that adds to the stress that mediocre people face.

Think about the Gary Blair quote above:

Quality work and an appreciation for the importance of details benefit not just the clients a business serves; these attitudes and habits also bring joy and peace of mind to the person who delivers the work. To know how to do something exceptionally well is to enjoy it.

The joy and peace of mind that comes from an attention to detail – quality work – is worth taking yourself out of your comfort zone and giving this wonderful career of Sales everything you’ve got.

They say that in order to be good at Sales you’ve got to love it.

It’s hard to love something you SUCK AT.

Do you want to enjoy your work? Do you want less stress? Here is a start:

Get good.