You will never be short of sales if you are…

To be ‘hell-bent’ refers to your determination (or that of your team) to achieve personal success, and if you are not prepared to strive for and to reach success for yourself and family…what credentials do you have for helping others?

Determination is a quality that everyone has, but it is an asset that very few people use, except perhaps in extreme circumstances. For example, when a young married couple discover that they are to become parents for the first time, the purpose and resolve of both partners is almost always very high…as they contemplate this momentous event and their aim to do their best for their child, no matter what. The same sense of ‘do or die’ seems to drive people who are visited by life-threatening illnesses, as they prepare to fight as never before. Well, the fact is that very successful business people, at every level, owe much of their achievement to knowing the difference between ‘doing the job’…and ‘getting the job done’. There is a profound variation in the two outlooks: one takes effort and the other takes everything you’ve got - and as with any form of exercise, those that give everything they’ve got, immediately find out that they are stronger and more capable than before they gave their all. It is worth remembering that we should not ‘give more so as to get more’; we should learn ‘to give more, so that we get better at giving more!’ If the former edict were true, then whenever we give more we would always get more, but this doesn’t always happen; which is why so many people who give their best and get nothing back at that point…resolve never to give their best again.

Being ‘hell-bent’ involves genuinely wanting to do your best so as to be as valuable as possible, and therefore consistently successful in your own right…which means doing what must be done, even when the mood to do it has disappeared!

To be ‘heaven-sent’ starts with understanding what matters most to those you serve, or put another way it concerns your ability to empathise with people…so that you become sensitive to their aims, their problems and their need for help. Empathy (meaning ‘to feel with’ someone, as opposed to sympathy which means ‘to feel for’ someone), is a special quality developed by association with people beyond a transactional relationship of ‘supplier and customer’. Customers do not go home at night to ‘customerland’; they are people, and as such they must achieve ever-improving results for their businesses…and yet they rarely if ever turn to suppliers for help to improve results! They have come to expect that suppliers will sell products and offer service, and that’s about it…and there is no complaint about this because that’s what most suppliers ‘do’. However, a supplier that is ‘heaven-sent’ is driven by empathy to the point where they know two irrefutable facts: If we help our customers to become more successful, in a direct sense with our products and perhaps indirectly in other ways, then they will buy more from us and therefore help us to become more successful.

This beats the pants off trying to ‘up-sell’ or use other mindless marketing myths, all of which turn sales people off first, and then the customers! Here is an example of ‘down-selling’, a professional process advocated in article # 150: one of the pool retail shops, operated on a franchise basis, gives customers a bottle and asks them to bring it in with water from their pool, at times when they have problems knowing what chemicals to use, and how much, etc. The customer’s name is marked on the bottle, along with a number that identifies the customer in their computer system. When the customer takes in the bottle filled with water, an analysis is undertaken and a printout advises the customer of precisely what products are ‘needed’. No sales techniques are used in this process, which in itself is almost heavenly for customers, and both parties enjoy maximum success!

To be hell-bent but not heaven-sent involves an indulgent drive but not a worthy destination; and to be heaven-sent but not hell-bent, involves ‘trying’ to do for others what you will not do for yourself.