The Most Important Sale You Will Ever Make!

I have been receiving the newsletter from Jeffrey Gitomer for some time. A recent edition had a section about where he said that the most important sale you will make every day is in your own mind.

This is REALLY hard. It is much easier to get up in the morning, and enjoy some good coffee, and maybe some more good coffee, and sit and think about all the meetings that have not panned out … about the people that I met but have not pursued further … about the people I have tried to follow-up and engage with but who have not returned my call or email … and on and on. It is easy to hold a pity party and complain.

At times like these, I invariably realize (at least eventually) that it is totally unrealistic for me to expect that folks I do not know well, or at all, should respond to a single email from me and be really excited to engage with me … a guy that they have never heard of, or that they vaguely remember meeting at a networking event and talked with only briefly.

The easy answer is to be more persistent, and more annoying, and to cast my nets wider. To play the sales cold calling numbers game to increase the odds of my success.

But, upon reflection, I don’t think those easy answers really address the problem. They can be good and everything, but they tend to get me to just do more of the same and expect a different result.

I think the true answer starts somewhere else … it starts with clearly stating the Why. Why should someone meet with me? Why should they take time out of their busy schedules to meet with me? How can I help them? And why would I want to help them? And, I need to make it easy for them to respond! And I need to make it easy for them to say yes!

And, it all starts at the beginning of every day when I need to make my most important sale … the one to my own mind. The sale to myself everyday that says why I am worth it and why I can help and how I can bring real value for those I connect with.