An excerpt adapted from Shiftability: Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage in Selling.
Anyone in sales today faces an uncertain future. We could almost say anyone in any business role today faces an uncertain future. We live in an age of disruption and disintermediation. The business landscape is rapidly and radically changing and it keeps getting harder to predict what lies ahead.
Sales methodologies are changing as well, partly in response to the flux in the business environment. Through the valuable work and research of many in the field we understand the nature of the buying and selling relationship differently.
All of this uncertainty around us raises an important question:
The sales context has changed.
Selling methodologies are changing.
Have you changed?
What we see today is sales professionals responding to all of the movement around them by switching companies, or changing roles, and of course attempting to change the way they do things. Because this is how human beings respond when faced with a problem: Okay, what do I have to do to fix this? We get asked this all the time in our coaching and managing of sales teams: Yes, everything is changing. What should we do?
The assumption is if we just do the right things, we will have the right results and then we will be successful. Perhaps you have thought this way too and tried to change things around you and the way you do things. Likely you have found yourself in the same place, getting the same results, running up against the same frustrations. And we have to ask—what is the common denominator? The answer is you.
You can change your job, change your boss, change your city, and try a new method, but unless you undergo a personal transformation yourself, all of these external changes in context and methodology are not going to get you where you need to go or help you become who you need to be in order to have success in a complex new world
Deepak Chopra said, “I am not a human thinking, I am not a human doing, I’m a human being.” When we try to do the right things in order to get the right results, expecting to then be successful, we are saying that we are “human doings.”
Instead, we need to start with who we are and what we believe. Human beings act out of their beliefs and sense of purpose; what we do is a result of what we believe.
So before you change what you do, first we need to explore what you believe and how much of what you are doing is determined by fear, concern or limited ways of thinking. This is where personal transformation starts.
This personal transformation is necessary to solve the challenge facing every sales professional today: how do I stay relevant in this new world, navigate the shifting environment around me, and deliver value to both my client and my company?
Read more about achieving personal transformation in Shiftability: Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage in Selling.
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