Almost all success-seeking people have been torn by this conflict at some point in their careers, and most of us live with it all our active lives. Perhaps we can’t eliminate this ongoing battle. But we can decide whether we’ll lose every day, lose usually, win usually, or win every time. We can’t, of course, win every sale. Forces beyond our control will cost us a sale now and then. That’s okay. What isn’t okay is to constantly lose out to our same old unresolved fears and anxieties.
Think about that. In the privacy of your own thoughts, consider whether this conflict isn’t the chief obstacle to your being an outstanding success. Not lack of ability, not lack of product knowledge, but simply nonperformance of what you know you should do because of conflict.
Resolving these fears and anxieties is surprisingly easy when you know how to do it. The first requirement is to admit that you’re like everyone else—you have them. They may not show on the outside. But the people around you have them, and you have them. Recognizing this fact is the first gate you have to go through. The next one is to decide that you’re not going to let those beatable fears and anxieties stand between you and what you want in life.
When you’ve made that decision, read on. Explore how you get depressed. Study this enemy and find the weak point you’ll strike at to eliminate it. Learn about the motivators and how to use them; about the de-motivators and how to defeat them. Then you’ll start doing what you know you should do. You’ll do that naturally and without great strain because you want to.
How You Get Depressed
Do you ever get down? Do you ever have times when you just can’t get up and make yourself do what you know you should do? Days when you’d just as soon drive right by the office, not call in, and hide? Ever have that feeling? Let me show you how you got that feeling.
It’s a safe bet that you wouldn’t be in the profession of selling if you weren’t interested in making money. And it’s an equally safe bet that you’ll agree with this statement: I don’t make as much money when I’m depressed as I do when I’m enthusiastic.
If you accept that, I think you’ll go along with this idea: If I can decrease the time I’m depressed, and increase the time I’m enthusiastic, I’ll make more money.
Notice that I haven’t said, “Increase your enthusiasm and you’ll automatically decrease your depression.” Thousands of sales meetings every month prove that the pep imparted from the stage is lost before the depressed salespeople in the group get out the door. On the rust of conflict-caused depression, you can spray any amount of enthusiasm—and it always flakes off. But enthusiasm does stick to alertness, knowledge, and purpose. That’s why I make this assertion in complete confidence: “Decrease your depression and you’ll automatically increase your enthusiasm.” Compare the two quotation-marked sentences in this paragraph. The difference between these deceptively similar statements is enormous: The second one works, the first doesn’t. Following the first statement produces the slim pickings of failure; following the second produces the riches and satisfactions of success.
Certainly, build your enthusiasm by every reasonable means. But before you throw yourself into that useful activity, make sure your enthusiasm will have a clean surface to stick to. Sandblast the rust of depression off your brain first.
To do that, you need to know exactly how you get depressed.
Let’s take a close look at the conflict that starts a frustration that grows until it depresses you. I call this whole process “forging the chain of depression” because it is a series of events. As with any chain, to destroy its holding power you need break only one link. Here is the process by which you’ve been forging the chain of depression within yourself— the steps to getting down:
1. Conscious of your wants and needs, you motivate yourself—and move forward. Imagine yourself starting the engine of a high-powered sports car.
2. Conscious of your fears and anxieties, you de-motivate yourself—and are stopped. Your sports car is sitting in mud up to its hubcaps; the drive wheels are spinning but you aren’t going anywhere.
3. Some of the salespeople around you are moving ahead—but you aren’t and your frustration mounts rapidly. You see what they are doing, you know what you should do, but the more you want to, the harder it is to make yourself do it. In the sports car, you gun the engine and throw lots of mud. But you don’t move. Instead, you dig yourself in deeper. Your frustration runs into the red, and you pound the wheel angrily.
4. Because you aren’t able to close sales and move forward to satisfy your wants and needs, you lose faith in your product and company or—what’s much worse—in yourself. When any of these things happen, the frustration eating at you turns into depression. It’s as though you give up trying to gun your sports car out of the mud, shut off the engine, and step out into the muck to go it on foot.
5. Now you’re too depressed to take any effective course of action on your own, and you’ll remain in that immobile state until some outside force moves you out of it.
A sports car driver, confronted by the simple mechanical problem described, would immediately squish off through the mud in search of a tow. But we’re slower to go looking for help when confounded by depression in sales work because the solution to our situation isn’t obvious. In fact, we might not even recognize that we have a common challenge, one that can readily be resolved.
If you’re depressed now about your sales performance, ever have been in the past, or think it’s possible that you could be in the future, you need to review the sources of motivation.
The Motivators
The first motivator of the great salesperson is money. Why is money a motivator? It allows you to get the things you want and need. Money is good. Repeat that out loud.
Money is good.
Money Is Good,
MONEY IS GOOD.
Money is good so long as what you earn is in direct proportion to the service you give. It’s good, but money by itself won’t make you happy. All that money can do is give you opportunities to explore what will make you happy. And while you’re searching, you’ll be a lot happier with money than without it, don’t you agree?
The way to get more money is to change the “s” in the word Service into a dollar sign: $ervice. This is because the amount of money you earn is totally dictated by the amount and level of service you provide to others. Money is what I call a scoreboard reflection of the service you give. If you aren’t making enough money, you aren’t giving enough service.
The second motivator is security. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is the foundation of most motivational courses. This theory teaches that the average human being strives daily to supply physical needs, that is, to obtain security. In a primitive society, security might be a flock of goats and a weatherproof cave or tent; in our society, security is something bought with money. Without money, you can’t buy clothes. If you ran around naked, would you agree that you’d feel somewhat insecure? If you aren’t wearing the right quality and style of clothes for a given occasion, you also feel insecure. Money buys a wide variety of possessions that to some degree provide us with a feeling of security. So money is a tremendous motivator, both as a direct measure of success and as a provider of a sense of security.
Achievement is the third motivator. Almost everyone wants to achieve, but almost no one wants to do what’s necessary to achieve. I believe that people
