Selling is one of the hardest professions in America. It is also the only profession in which a person can start with limited skills to achieve one of the highest incomes in our economy.

There are no speed limits. You can go as far and as fast as you want by stepping on the accelerator of your own ambition and determination to excel in the profession of sales.

whenever a business was succeeding, growing, yielding profitability, increasing its share prices, and offering opportunity for more and more people, the reason boiled down to one factor: “high sales.” Everything else was secondary.

Everything either helps or hurts. Everything either attracts and keeps more customers—or drives them away. Everything counts when it comes to sales.

Whether you are a salesperson or a business owner, you require the self-discipline to focus and concentrate on generating sales every hour of every business day.

The researchers then conducted a time-and-motion study of these same business owners and executives, following them around and tracking their time usage over the course of a month.

The remaining time was spent on meetings, discussions, paperwork, administrative work, luncheons, and a variety of other activities that contributed nothing to sales generation.

. Do your paperwork before or after work, but during working hours, when customers are available to be seen, you should dedicate yourself entirely to sales generation.

the biggest problem that telephone salespeople and outside salespeople face is rejection.

The fear of rejection does more to sabotage a sales career and undermine sales activities than any other single factor. It is the major obstacle to sales success.

It takes tremendous discipline for salespeople to get up every morning and go out and face the inevitable rejection that they know they are going to receive all day long.

to avoid the emotional pain that comes with rejection, many salespeople engage in a series of “displacement” activities to avoid being rejected.

The rule for sales success can be contained in six words: “Spend more time with better prospects.” There is no other way to generate a high, consistent, and predictable level of sales results.

The key to sales success, as I learned as a young salesman, is to realize that rejection is not personal

The professional salesperson realizes that these are simply normal and natural responses to any commercial offer in a competitive marketplace. Again, they are not personal—so don’t take them personally.

The key to sales success is to eliminate the fear of rejection, to become so confident and optimistic that you can call continually all day long and still remain positive and cheerful.

There is a direct relationship between the number of new customer contacts you make and your level of sales. If you want to increase the number of sales, simply discipline yourself to call on more prospects.

if you are earning all the money that you are earning today with only the number of minutes you are spending face to face with customers today, by increasing that number of minutes, you can also increase your sales.

We teach them to use every bit of intelligence and creativity they have to increase the amount of time they spend talking in person with prospects rather than following the path of least resistance and allowing themselves to procrastinate getting out into the marketplace.

The actual sale itself is not under your direct control. It is controlled by a variety of factors about which you can do very little.

You must discipline yourself to plan your sales activities—especially your prospecting activities—every single day, and then you have to discipline yourself to follow through on your plans and resolutions.

But the activities that lead to sales are completely under your control. The rule is “Do what you can with what you have right where you are.”

There is a direct ratio between the number of cold calls you make and the number of prospective customers that you will be able to talk to or visit.

There is a direct ratio between the number of prospective customers that you see or talk to and the number of prospects that you can follow up on.

There is a direct ratio between the number of people you follow up on with proposals and presentations and the number of sales that you close.