3 Things To Be Thankful For If You're In Sales

With Thanksgiving here, I made a short list of things that people in sales should be grateful for. Yes, sales is hard. It can be lonely, demotivating and hard. But there are a few things that make a career in sales totally worthwhile.

You choose who your clientele is. This may be partially true, depending on your industry. In the insurance business, I decide who I want to deal with. For me personally, I enjoy working with business owners and entrepreneurs. Others may want to work with senior citizens, or the special needs market. My years of working retail, where you had to deal with anyone who walked through the door, helped me decide that I wanted a career where I could choose my customers.
You can set your own schedule. Want to take a week off? Do it. Need a sick day? Take it. I will stay up at all hours of the night working on marketing, scheduling, paperwork, etc, so I can have time off during the day for family time (when they are awake). Remember, you have to still work hard to earn the rewards of a flexible schedule. I suggest you create a list of things that need your attention and plug each one into your calendar. But when you want to take a couple of weeks off for the holidays, you'll be able to do it without guilt.
Unlimited income. Like I mention in my book, if you have a salaried job and have a very productive day, you've made the same amount of money as you would if you did nothing. In sales, when you have a productive day, you make even more money! How great is that? And if you like to compete against yourself, you'll keep breaking your "high score", like a video game.

Have a great holiday season and keep moving forward.

Chris Castanes is a speaker who helps sales people succeed through workshops and humorous presentations. For booking information, click here.

Comments

Introducing the "You're Going To Be Great At This!" Podcast

I was pretty surprised when I saw that my last blog post was several months ago. Time really does fly when you're having fun, or in my case, just having a busy workload. In the last few months I've been on the road for an approximate total of 9 weeks. Needless to say I get less than motivated to work in a hotel room after selling insurance for 8 hours, so blogging isn't on my "to do" list. While driving in my car during these trips I try to make my time productive my listening to podcasts on business and marketing. I'm not sure if someone was trying to tell me something but over the course of a week or so, I heard 4 episodes on how starting a podcast can help boost your business. After mulling this over and considering my options, I decided to take the plunge and start one myself. I've had a YouTube channel for a while which is fine, but I wanted to do something a little different. So I decided to start the "You're Going To Be Great At This!"...

When It Rains, It's Time To Call

If you're anything like me, you hate to cold call. Especially when the weather is nasty. But when I first started out in the business, I had to "drop in" on people because I didn't have any contacts or referral sources. Working in a B2B setting was difficult to get the decision maker when he or she was out playing golf or "taking the rest of the day off" when it was nice and sunny. I did realize, however, that the odds of contacting business owner and manager increased greatly when the weather was bad. I also realized that the worse the weather was, my competitors wouldn't be out in it either. That left me, alone in the rain or sleet or hail, to call on prospects that I wanted to convert to customers. And it worked more often than not. If you're having a hard time trying to pin your B2B prospect down, try making an in-person visit or a phone call when the weather is bad. It may work for you. Chris Castane s is a humorous speaker who helps sales ...

The Telemarketer's Leads - A Dumb Story

For a brief few months I worked as a telemarketer for a small firm owned by a young married couple. The husband was a bit of a hot head and kind of a jerk on occasion, but his wife was nice and had to put up with the guy. One of their clients was a mobile home company that wanted people to come to the lot and see how awesome their singlewides and doublewides were. As telemarketers we offered incentives like a cooler and camera (back when they weren’t part of your phone) and other assorted giveaways. We got a small commission if we could book the client. My coworkers and I would call from a list of leads that our employers had purchased from someone. These leads were supposedly “qualified” ahead of time, meaning that they had been vetted to meet the needs of the client, the mobile home company. Unfortunately, most of the leads were useless. The people we spoke to didn’t live in the right geographical areas or their incomes were too low. “Why aren’t you guys closing anyone?” t...

You're Going To Be Great At This!

Search This Blog