Why is this happening to me? When is somebody going to train me? When am I going to find good people? I am sure you have all heard questions similar to these.
You may have even asked these questions yourself. But what ever happened to personal responsibility? People are too quick to point a finger and fail to realize that three fingers point back at them. They judge others in thirty seconds but don't even take ten seconds to assess themselves.
Let's pretend for a moment that you are a manager of a cell phone stand at the local mall. The stand is only big enough to have two employees working at once. On this particular day you are working with Joe. Joe has been with you for five months. He has been through all of your training programs, and you even sent him to a strategic selling seminar last month to help him increase his selling ability. It is a nice sunny day, so the traffic in the mall is minimal. After opening the store and not seeing a customer for the first two hours a middle-aged couple comes to your stand looking for a phone. Joe is with them for an entire hour! Everything looks like its going well. Then they walk away. That couple could be the only potential customers to walk over all day. You wonder what happened. Why did he lose the sale? Immediately you walk over to Joe to ask. He says, "They weren't going to buy today… They were just looking… They didn't find a style they liked." Pointing the finger! They, they, they! All he needed to say was that he was outsold! No excuses. Just admit you were wrong and then figure out what you can do differently next time. Until Joe is willing to admit he is wrong he cannot move forward and he will to continue to lose sales.
People often reach a point in their performance that they cannot seem to surpass. They think they are so good that they don't need to change. One way they can get through that is to admit they could have done things differently. If customers told Joe all day everyday that they were "just looking" and Joe didn't overcome that objection, he would lose a lot of sales. Joe needs to quit making excuses and accept responsibility so he can formulate a way to overcome that. He might ask them open-ended questions like, "What did you have in mind?" or, "What can I show you today?" Rather than, "Can I help you find something?" Questions like these will help prevent losing valuable customers to the competition.
The only thing worse than excuses is, "I'll try" or "I tried". All that means is that you are too lazy to even come up with an excuse! One day I was listening to a fellow consultant and he was telling a story about one of his follow-up seminars. During this follow-up meeting, one of the students said that they tried what he taught and it didn't work. Without delay the consultant took out a pen, walked over to the gentleman, set the pen on the desk and said, "Try to pick up this pen". The man picked up the pen with ease. The consultant took the pen and set it down again saying, "Don't pick it up. Just try to pick it up." After one more try the man understood the consultant's point. There is a significant difference between doing and trying. People that "do" don't "try". And people that "try" don't "do".
Take a lesson from Joe. The power is in the question. What can I do to improve? What can I do differently today? What image do I want to project of myself? Start asking yourself the right questions and take responsibility for your actions.
Author Bio: Adam DesAutels – President and CEO of DesAutels Communications Agency. A full service business development firm that specializes in planning, marketing advice, research, and general business Q and A (consulting). DesAutels supports the most successful small businesses around the nation in growing their companies. For a complementary Business Evaluation ($200 value) call 866.521.3780. |
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