Always be learning

- It doesn't matter how good you are right now. As soon as you stand still, you're moving backwards. Whether it's reading books, using E-learning platforms, watching videos online, asking your peers, joining forums, whatever it is, you need to keep developing yourself. Whether you're the top biller in your business or a struggling sales person, it's always important. The new people obviously need to learn the basics, but the experienced people also need to learn how to improve themselves. So there's no such thing as perfect, especially in something like sales where it's an art in an ever-changing environment. So if you think about it, professional athletes train every day. Usain Bolt didn't smash world records without constantly improving and constantly learning. He didn't run 100 meters in under 10 seconds and stop there. That's already an incredible feat. To date, less than 100 people have achieved that on record, but he kept pushing, kept thinking, "How can I get faster?" And then he did that. Then he thought, "How can I get even faster?" And then he did that too. And so on and so on, until he broke the world record. And then he broke his own world record again. If he'd stopped training and improving, Gatlin and Blake would have caught him and taken his medals. So as soon as you stop improving when everyone else is, they start overtaking you, which like I said, you're effectively moving backwards. So what can you do to keep improving when sales is technically an art? There's no foot placements, there's no aerodynamics or slow-motion cameras. It's just you. So my biggest tip is to use mentors and colleagues and learn from people who are more experienced than you or are selling in the same market as you. Listen in on your colleagues' cold calls; you'd be amazed what they say, and you'd never thought of yourself, or how they overcome objections that you're always struggling with. Also, ask them what works for them, or share your most common objections in sales meetings, or ask your manager how they overcame the same objections when they first started out. Then, learning from people more experienced than you are, make sure you befriend the top biller in your business and ask them how they do it. I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you, and find people who've been salespeople for a long time in other businesses and buy them a coffee to understand how they did it. Join forums and online discussions to hear inputs from all over the world and all other industries, and find experienced people on E-learning platforms that have been there before and are passing on their wisdom. If you improve your selling ability by just 1%, then that's an improvement that will be an additional sale to you that you wouldn't have got otherwise. So there's a financial incentive to improve. Keep repeating that and it adds up. Improve by 5%, 10%, 50%, just imagine. So my tip for you this week is to seek additional knowledge from your surroundings. If you only do one thing, pick a successful colleague and ask if you can listen in on their cold calls for half an hour or longer. Trust me, it will not disappoint.