About a month ago another sales person and I were asked to give a presentation to our sales team about sales objections and closing. I have this as an audio file however I haven’t had the time to upload it to the clips section of this site yet.
We have a young team of sales professionals and before we started our presentation I wanted to speak about my top three sales quotes that I live and die with. I thought it would be good to share these with the team and hopefully some would get it and some would be inspired. All I gave to the team was my three quotes, but not the info below.
The Harder you Work the Luckier you Get: Believe it or not, many of us don’t know how to work hard. At one point in my life I had no clue what hard work was, or better yet, I didn’t know how to work hard. There’s the physical aspect of work where labor is involved, working hard as a laborer would mean that you only stop doing something when you’re on break or lunch, otherwise you move from one task to another.
At 16 years old I went to work for a produce company close to my hometown of Iselin, NJ. Looking back I was doing nothing, hanging with my crowd when someone walked over to us and asked who wanted to work unloading a truck of produce. You know who spoke up? And I never looked back. This laborious job gave me a rude awakening about working hard. I was exhausted after the first hour and was taunted by the owner’s son because I was not moving fast enough.
The job I took with the produce company lasted about 5 years or so and consisted of being at work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Most weeks I was working seven days stocking produce, unloading produce from trucks, loading trucks, cleaning produce, cleaning the store, and managing the garbage. The taunting almost never stopped by the owner’s sons and I’d have to agree I didn’t know how to work hard, however one of the sons did. There was always something to do and when there was nothing to do you needed to figure out something to do before you were yelled at. A lot of people would have quit, however I needed the job; the pay was crap, but the long hours gave me a nice check at the end of week. Over the years I got bigger, stronger (from all of the lifting) and had my first introduction into retail sales since we sold our produce to the public. From ages 16-21 it was drilled into my head I wasn’t paid to think, I was paid to work. Thus the 12 hours days and seven days a week became my normal working hours. Like a sports professional that has muscle memory for hitting a baseball or swinging a golf club, the work habits I developed at the produce company stayed with me for the rest of my life.
The harder you work the luckier you get means that as long as you maximize your effort you will always get rewarded. It may not be today, tomorrow or next week but you will be rewarded. In our industry our main effort is focused on prospecting and selling, thus if you are an over achiever you’ll be rewarded with opportunities. I can’t tell you the last time I worked a 40-hour week. My weeks are always 50 hours or more. I’m often asked why do you work so much and my response is because I want to be the best sales person at my company. I want to be the guy with the big numbers, the big quota. The most sales and make some dough while doing it. I want to write my own ticket to where I want to go.
I’m not the most prolific closer, I don’t have the vocabulary as some of my peers, and I’m probably not as educated as the rest of them. But there’s one thing I have and it’s the innate ability to outwork everyone else.
Good selling!
Stay tuned for Quote #2 next week.
