Jonathan Farrington

As we near the end of the year, this is an excellent time to take stock and ask yourself some important questions to ensure that you are totally prepared for the fresh set of challenges that lay ahead next year.

Sometimes we get on instantly with other people, occasionally there’s a clash. Changing your behaviour to suit different people is perfectly normal. It doesn’t change you as an individual, nor is it manipulative.

The most important fact to remember in influencing the behaviour and decisions of others is that - "People do things for their reasons, not ours."

The traditional customer call once seemed indispensable to the selling process; the time and expense involved were just a basic cost of doing business. In recent years, however, the business community has come to regard the sales call as an expenditure for which there are substitutes.

As we are all aware, getting to know the customer and understanding their needs is not a quick and easy process. Customers possess a hierarchy of needs which have to be uncovered gradually. This is why we need a new type of salesperson for a new type of customer.

In commercial terms we should seek to develop our teams in two specific areas i.e. Competence and Commitment. Competence consists of the combination of knowledge and skills whilst Commitment is a combination of confidence and motivation.

The organisation with the ability to overcome the variety of mental models living in the minds of their workforce will be the organisation that wins in the future.

Allowing self-limiting beliefs to constrain performance, will in turn limit sales results because like everyone, salespeople hold stubbornly to private beliefs about themselves, clients, markets, competition, and even the economy, beliefs that can have an enormous impact, either positive or negative, on their sales achievement levels.