The 5 beliefs that kill your results

1. The Rider on the White Horse

It is that business (that you have had before) that appears on your radar and if it closes it saves a quarter and gives a tremendous boost to the cash flow.

Of course, we all love to take masterstrokes and bring great business in.

In the meantime, however, however.

I don't mean to pour water on your beer:

1. If you have sex with King Kong, you have sex with him however he wants. If your clients are much bigger than you, and if you only have one or two clients in your portfolio (making up 80% or more of your income), you are held hostage by the situation, you have a boss, and you know it.

2. Your delivery will be a Frankenstein, and you and your staff at the mercy of the wishes and tastes of your King Kong. Every hour a different demand, a little pull, another one there, and you are breaking your company bit by bit.

3. And now the worst: The belief that you dilute this risk by bringing in other clients of the same size. It won't work. White Knights (they appear like this and then become King Kongs) are not replicable. They are circumstantial businesses that close due to a confluence of imponderable and non-scalable factors.

What to do if you are in a relationship with a King Kong. Give yourself a deadline (starting today) of 12 months to be independent of him. Create the capacity to get other (much smaller) clients in and pivot your company to work at scale, no matter how small you start.

Great customers will leave one day. And you need to come out of the story in one piece.

And when one of these pops up on your radar, don't keep flapping your calves and running back and forth like a headless chicken. Sorry for the bluntness (but someone has to say it clearly).

Not easy, but vital. Your biggest customer should not exceed 5% of your revenue. Whatever it takes.

2. Miracle App

It is that new software that makes automatic sales for you, that prevents you from being present in front of your market and guarantees that if you stay hidden behind your monitor sending e-mails and recording videos, the companies in your market will deposit money in your checking account, buying automatically.

By trade and inclination, I get and test just about every high-end CRM on the market, every piece of software that is within my reach, and I spend a few early mornings testing it.

I feel that many students are surprised by my proficiency in this subject, where I give names and examples of the applications that came out yesterday that I have already tested.

How does a fifty-year-old know all this?

Well, if you have paid to be in my classroom or if you have hired me to be your consultant, it is my obligation to put my eyes and my experience at your service.

So there you go: No, none, no software or application is going to solve your sales problem.

Any thought other than this is to imagine that the new version of Microsoft Word will make my texts better or a successful and more competitive writer.

What will solve your sales problem is the trinomial product/target/methodology where, through an intense interaction with your market, you feed back the process in a continuous improvement and competitiveness moto.

Forget about software. Only think about them when you have a recurring portfolio and a scaled process of lead generation and conversion.

(okay, I'll give a break to the indignant ones). Did it pass? Good.

3. I don't need to talk to people to sell

This is the biggest problem of all. It is that you believe you are going to sell without communicating orally with people.

Extend the volume of calls and visits in your weeks tremendously. Use email and others (social networks, Whatsapp, sms etc) as supporters. The core, the center of your business activity must be word of mouth. You need to and must talk to your market, as much as you can.

I often feel bad about the forcefulness with which I respond to people who complain about their results but don't interact with their market or do so bashfully, afraid of interaction and its consequent rejections.

If you want to sell, you need to talk to people. If you want to sell a lot you need to talk to a lot of people.

How many? 50 a day. Okay, I'll give you some time to cuss me out and get indignant (again!) with me.

Let's make a deal. Talk to half of it, every day, and tell me if in 30 days the problem has not been solved.

Many people - and I mean really many people - operating in the commercial area, in the segments of legal services, architecture, robotics, insurance, consulting, and in the most varied industries have filled their meeting agendas with qualified business deals.

Secret? None. You ask them they answer, "I've talked to 80 companies, I've made 320 calls, and I have 5, 10, 15 opportunities to close. I believe half of them I'll convert."

This person is independent and will never have a problem with sales. He understands that he needs to talk to the market to sell.

4. The market will recognize me and look for me

Fallacy. It won't. And your reserves will dwindle while you wait.

Unfortunately. The market is ruthless and the master of reason. You need to go out and get what is yours. Your competitors will do it.

Forget about the theories and rationalisms that keep you from falling head over heels in your marked. It will mess up your head and open a dangerous fistula in your focus.

The market will not look for you. Use this belief. It is the main belief you can adopt.

In reality, many companies may come to you to buy from you. If you advertise, opportunities appear on your radar.

Still: "The market is the most beautiful girl at the party and she might give you a little smile, too. Now, if you don't get your butt out of that chair, you'll be all alone."

5. I need to please everybody and be a nice person

You don't have to.

I see many nice, polite, kind people in sales, but completely unproductive. They stretch unnecessary dialogues, try to please everyone indistinctly, completely lose focus on the company's objectives and focus their attention on pleasing at any cost and lose the sense of what and who is important and who is not.

You need to be assertive, objective, and to the point with and for those who are genuinely interested in buying from you.

Don't look for compliments. Seek business.

Stavros Frangoulidis
Stavros Frangoulidis
CEO of PaP Solutions ⚡ Let's connect on Linkedin too

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