Today’s Listening and Reading

I finished The Dip by Seth Godin.

What an 11 Year Old Can Teach Us – Advanced Selling Podcast. As a result of listening to this podcast, I went and found…

533: It’s Not the Product, It’s the Person – This American Life Podcast, featurning the ‘Super Business Girl’, Asia Newson. This little ball of energy is known as Detroit’s Youngest Entrepreneur.

Episode 107 The 3 Drivers Of Sales Success Part I September 16, 2014 – Your Sales Playbook, Paul Castain. In this podcast, Mr. Castain talked all about driver 1: Acquiring new business.

Find Your Sales Voice by Taking Action

Castain needs to have Asia Newson open up for him at his keynotes. She knows how to acquire new business. More importantly, she takes action. Hers is a pretty powerful example of using what she has: energy, youth, a vision for her life, and using her products as an excuse for people to pay her for being the ambitious, yet winsome girl that she is.

Not sure if that made sense, but in simple terms, she just goes for it and does not let fear dominate her or cause her to procrastinate.  Granted, she has a silver bullet – her cuteness and her appeal as a young go-getter. Most of us old crusty salesguys don’t have ‘cute’ going for us.

But we have something going for us. We just need to find it and get out in front of people. Perhaps it’s even in the taking action and getting in front of people that we eventually figure out what we have to bring to the table. How do we know if we’re fearfully not taking action?

As we interact and get out there and knock it around, we start finding our sales voice. Just like a writer finds her voice and starts attracting the right readers, so does a salesperson develop a voice by taking action. He then starts attracting the right clients.

But it all starts with taking action (at least one action a day), which brings me to today’s action item…

Today’s Action Item: Castain’s 2 – 2 – 2

This is an exercise where you make sure to send two coldish emails, make two cold calls, and drop two cold letters in the mail.

That was my action item. Sadly, I did not take the action. I did schedule an appointment with someone from a cold email from earlier this week (because of this challenge), but I did not do it today.

My excuse is that I’m going out of town on Friday and Monday and am trying to make sure all ducks are in a row. My second excuse is that given my current role as a liaison between the insurance agents in my agency and the insurance companies, I’m less tied to a prospecting list, so I’d have to dust off some old databases.

But excuses are dumb and a waste. I need to learn to see through them. There’s absolutely no reason to take 30 minutes, identify 6 individuals to reach out to, and then reach out. I have value to create. I should be getting that in front of folks.

Sorry my 5s of readers! We shall hit it again tomorrow. 2-2-2. I’m on it.

Until tomorrow…