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The Complacency of Excellence

The Complacency of Excellence

The Complacency of Excellence
All situations, even good ones, present challenges. One challenge many companies face is a willingness to accept their current level of excellence. The challenges faced with both excellence and poor performance can be approached with the same tools.

Although leaders at most companies would certainly love to have the challenges created by excellence, this does not diminish the challenges presented. With excellence, often a company becomes stagnant. The employees can begin to accept success as a given. The employees begin to feel that their team is better and smarter than all the competition and want to relish their strong emotions of winning and accomplishment.

Business and sports can have many parallels. You all have witnessed a sporting event where one opponent takes a weaker opponent lightly and then displays poor performance.

Peak performance requires a strict set of rules to continue the high level of accomplishment and avoid complacency.

Here are some rules to gain and maintain excellence.

1. Learn from yesterday to get better for tomorrow and then forget yesterday. For instance, Bobby Knight only allowed his team to celebrate a victory and mourn a defeat until midnight. If you spend all the next day patting yourself on the back until your arm is tired, or you cry all day, either way you missed a day.

2. Get leverage on yourself. Whether you have achieved excellence or you are experiencing defeat. Leverage yourself to keep taking positive action. Are you motivated by pleasure or pain? What are your dreams and goals?

3. Create your own reality. No matter what your level of success or defeat, you can create a new reality. Everything starts in the mind. Your reality may be to sell as many cars but with less effort or time involved. Constantly stretching and challenging the mind is the key to continued success.

4. Educate and motivate. Learning awakens the child in you. The top CEO or entrepreneur is always learning a new angle or thought that propels them. Encourage and lead the way in educating your team. To quote a sign from an office at IBM, “There is never a saturation point to education.”

5. Seek out mentors, coaches and success-minded people. To keep momentum everyone needs pushing, prodding and cuddling. The right people in your life make a huge difference.

6. Look to other industries for models. Seek out companies in other industries that have continually improved, grown and prospered. Success leaves clues; sometimes you may become narrow-minded and only look for clues in your own industry.

7. Quantify to qualify. Numbers and statistics paint stories. If you believe you are at your maximum proficiency, evaluate everything in your business by the numbers, and you will quickly find room for improvement. You must evaluate where you have been, where you are and where you want to go.

8. Ask your customers. Never forget who can provide the best answers for your improvement plan. Stop depending on ineffective factory CSI programs that concentrate on numbers only and that ask silly ‘one-five’ or ‘yes or no’ questions. Randomly sample your customers. Call them and reward them for giving you conversational feedback. Ask your customers to talk to you.

9. Remember the five keys to peak selling performance.
Energy and enthusiasm
Emotion
Humor
Empathy
Your selling message

Success or defeat is simply a created definition. Be willing to redefine your plan and your goals. Behind all goals or accomplishments are desired emotions. Turn your picture of the goal into a red-hot flame to gain and maintain excellence.





The Complacency of Excellence - To learn more about this author, visit Mark Tewart's Website.

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Linda Richardson
Linda Richardson is the Founder and Executive Chairwoman of Richardson, a global sales training and performance improvement company. As a recognized leader in the industry, she has won the coveted Stevie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Sales Excellence and she was identified by Training Industry, Inc. as one of the “Top 20 Most Influential Training Professionals.” Ms. Richardson is credited with the movement to Consultative Selling and is the author of ten books on selling and sales management, including Sales Coaching — Making the Great Leap from Sales Manager to Sales Coach, and Stop Telling, Start Selling. She teaches sales and management at the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Executive Development Center. Linda is a frequent speaker at industry and client conferences, has been published extensively in industry and training journals, and has been featured in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Nation’s Business, Selling Power, Success, and The Conference Board Magazine. Learn more about Richardson's sales training and performance improvement solutions at http://www.richardson.com web - Visit Linda Richardson's Website


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Mark Tewart
(Visit Mark's Website) Mark Tewart started in the automotive industry as a salesperson in the early 1980s. Mark has been a Salesperson, Leasing Manager, F&I Manager, General Sales Manager and General Manager for two of the largest automotive chains in the country. He rose through the ranks to become a General Manager at the age of 27. Mark founded Tewart Enterprises Inc. in 1993 and has been a featured article writer for Auto Success Magazine, Dealer Magazine, and Ward's Dealer Business Magazine. Mark has had popular programs on ASTN(Automotive Satellite Training Network) for several years and conducts seminars and gives keynote speeches for corporations and state dealer associations around the country. Mark has also founded sales, management and F&I Training Academies based in Kansas City that are endorsed by several state dealer associations. His client list for his in-house training programs include dealers from all over the country and several of the largest dealers in the country. Mark is also a partner and National Marketing Manager for AutoSalesPro, Inc., a computer company providing the most advanced software solutions in the Automotive Industry.

Mark Tewart is a Platinum author on EvanCarmichael.com
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