Career Sales Training: Are You Responsible?

As a sales professional do you take full responsibility for your actions? Do you take full responsibility for what happens to you? You are responsible for your actions, your decisions, and what happens to you. Blaming yourself or anyone else, using excuses, and denial only hurt you and keep you from being able to succeed.

But the people who are supposed to support you just make things more difficult, and they don’t do what they say they will. Ok, so you know this to be true. That just means you’re responsible and as a responsible person you take action to get it done yourself. There isn’t any point in getting mad and inhibiting your own success. You have to keep doing whatever you need to do to succeed in spite of anyone and everything else. Take charge and create your own way that works around incompetent people and systems.

But you had no idea the potential prospect would react that way. Really, if it’s the first time that’s perfectly ok. You just had a great learning experience. Take the time to think about what went well and where things started to turn south. Knowing what you know now what will you do to prepare to handle this in a better way next time? If this is the second or third time, how many more times is it going to take for you to figure out that you need to do something different? There is this terrible misconception in sales that if something blows up in your face you need to keep doing it until you get the desired result. Hello, if something goes badly you need to learn to never do that in the same way again; or you can count on similar results.

But you did that because someone else told you to do it. As your mother would say if someone told you to jump off a bridge would you? You will be told to do a lot of things that supposedly worked for someone else. But if the person telling you is an extrovert and you’re an introvert, if their values are radically different than yours, if their behaviors are very different from yours, etc. does it even make sense that it would work for you? You have to succeed in sales based on your own values, behaviors, and attitudes. If something doesn’t feel right to you remember that’s just your little inner voice telling you that you shouldn’t be doing this. Listen. Not listening just gets you in trouble.

All buts aside the buck starts and stops with you. You are responsible for finding the way that’s right for you to succeed in sales. You are responsible for taking the actions you know you need to take. And you are the only person who can really hold you accountable for those actions. Your actions are really all about your motivation. If what you’re doing isn’t motivating to you perhaps you should find something else to do. If it is motivating for you, once you figure out how to make it work for you it will be almost impossible for you not to take action.