We all know the truth: Selling is hard work. It demands a paradoxical blend of goal clarity, motivation, and talent to consistently prospect for, pursue, and secure new revenue.
After observing, training, and coaching thousands of talented direct sales professionals across all industries and size companies for the past 24 years, ASLAN understands the need for a tactic that fully integrates personal motivation AND professional goals (vision) to achieve consistent sales success. In our shop, we like to call such a tactic “moti-vision.”
Whether you are a sales leader struggling to motivate your people toward professional development, or an individual seeking to cast your personal moti-vision, we encourage you to pause for a moment and answer these five questions. They form the foundational building blocks for clarifying your personal moti-vision.
- How much new revenue/new clients/new policies am I expected to sell each week/month/year?
- How does my product/service serve other’s needs/make the world a better place?
- What’s something really personal I want/need?
- When do I want/need to have it by?
- How much more do I have to sell each week/month to get it?
Recently I had the opportunity to help Bonnie, a talented waitress for 24 years, transition into her first pure sales role by leveraging her answers to these five questions to cast her “piggy bank vision.” Our conversation immediately led her to achieve breakthrough performance and professional development.
Context: Bonnie sells auto and home/renters insurance over the phone. Like most direct sales jobs, It’s a competitive, commoditized, congested playing field that breeds “customer skepticism and resistance” at the point of sale. Thus, Bonnie is under constant pressure to sell.
Despite having a natural ability to connect with people, and a real desire to serve others honed during over two decades of waitressing, Bonnie was struggling to convert conversations into commission. She shared how it seemed that the harder she tried, the more energy she expended, the less success she achieved. She was missing her quota, beginning to doubt her ability to sell, and missing the personal job fulfillment she experienced as a waitress.
Enter our Other-Centered Selling workshop, and Bonnie’s revelation: “ASLAN’s approach of placing the customer’s needs as my highest priority removed all the “power struggles” from my calls. That was so freeing. Learning how to “engage” – ask the customer permission to begin my “discovery” process – has my customer participating right from the outset. And now I feel like a waitress again versus a pushy insurance saleswoman!”
Armed with her new view of her role as “servicing and educating” versus “selling,” Bonnie hit the phones with increased comfort and confidence. When I saw her two weeks later, she reported that her job satisfaction and conversion ratios were on the rise. Yet, she was acutely aware that she was still struggling to keep her “battery” (motivation) fully charged day in and day out.
As we walked Bonnie through the results of our proprietary Sales Engine Evaluation, which measures goal clarity, motivation and 16 fears that drain salespeople’s motivational batteries like open apps drain a mobile phone, we used the five questions above to help her cast a personal moti-vision.
When Bonnie finally began to believe that she was really serving and protecting drivers and homeowners, her vision and professional goals to sell 30 policies per month took on more meaning. However, she was still missing a vital ingredient to sales success: the personal motivation to fuel her efforts day after day.
We found that fuel in her passion for serving others as a waitress when she shared her reason for having to retire from the role she loved: “My knees are bad. That’s why I took a phone sales job. Both my knees need to be replaced, but I don’t have the money.”
At that moment, Bonnie’s “piggy bank moti-vision” was cast. We worked through the math together and discovered she earns approximately $25 for each policy she binds. Her right knee is the most painful and would cost $2500 beyond her medical insurance coverage to replace it.
Knowing the end game, we broke her monthly goals into daily portions. We agreed she needed the first 30 policies sold per month to cover her living expenses, but that she would physically put $25 in her piggy bank for every additional policy she sold each month.
The next month Bonnie sold 46 policies compared to her personal best of 20 before adopting ASLAN’s OCS approach and casting her personal moti-vision to walk pain-free by January 2020.
Here was her text to me explaining what happened:
“Having it broken down into bite-sized daily pieces completely changed it for me. Before the $2500 I needed felt insurmountable. Now it feels kind of like a piggy bank: It’s a long-term goal that will just build on itself. All I have to do is keep putting those small payouts into my piggy bank, and it WILL happen.”
If you have been struggling to motivate others or yourself toward professional development in direct sales, we encourage you to leverage the power of “personal motivation” to fuel your professional vision. If you need help casting your moti-vision, reach out.
ASLAN Training & Development
ASLAN teaches sellers an easier, better way to gain access & influence unreceptive customers, by eliminating the hard sell.
