It seems that our brains are tuned to like gossips, conspiracy theories and negativity. We can indulge in all these activies without much effort. Contrast this with doing something useful early morning like planning your day or start working on your project immediately; it is anything but easy.
A typical day starts with discussions about what happened between Joe and boss yesterday, how you "taught someone a lesson for life", what is going to happen if your manager can’t manage to deliver his or her project on time or what happened in your neighborhood (or home) last night etc.
These are all early morning discussions. After that you can discuss what you are going to eat at lunch, why the company’s lunch is so bad, why the new guy in sales (or accounts etc.) is so stupid or how someone from [the political party you hate] is so corrupt and inept.
There are two problems with these activies:
- You waste your valuable time.
- You de-tune your mind to do the real work. Getting into the flow of doing real work requires concentrationw which is already lost.
Joe Girard asks you to avoid joining the informal club at your workplace where all the above discussions happen. This club is active when all sales people get togather and don’t have anything immediate or urgent to do.
Unless you are in a dead end job (where every day is just another days without any value addtion to your personality), you waste extemely valuable time by joining the club. (And if you are in a dead end job, get rid of it; TODAY).
Selling is something not limited to making a sales call and asking someone to buy your product. There are countless other activities you need to do everyday; making a list of new prospects to call or mail, upadating your mailing list, updating your website with new promotions or staff, writing some new training material for your products, sending thank you letters, greeting cards or emails, reminding existing customers any service due dates, sending some free stuff to your loyal customer or reading a book on sales and marketing; just to name a few.
An effective sales process is like sowing seeds daily. Some seeds will be wasted, some seeds may not grow and some will become trees in the time to come. Unfortunately you do not know which seeds are good and which are bad. So for better results you sow a large number of seeds.
All these selling activities, sowing seeds, require a lot of time. By not joining the club you can do one or another of these activies all day and increase your chances of more sales.
Joe says:
.. there is a lot of turnover among beginning salespeople. And the reason that is true is because just about anybody can make a few sales at the start. Whether it is cars or insurance or anything else, everybody can buy one himself, sell one to his father-in-law, and sell another one to his best friend. "After the third sale," a sales manager once told me, "is when you know if a guy is a real salesman or not."
I don’t want you to shutdown your newly started business or stop selling after your third sale. Save time by not joining the club and invest it in selling activities.
Joe narrates an interesting experience. When he started selling cars on his first job, he avoided joining the club. This resulted in such a good performance that, despite being new and inexperienced, he was selling more cars than the experienced and old guys at that place. He was then fired because old guys complained that he was taking their business but also probably because he did not join the club. So you need to be careful too not to alinate someone by not joining the club.
Armaghan Saqib 