The most important element in business success is selling. Nothing happens until a sale takes place.

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.

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.

Almost everything you do in a business either increases or decreases sales.

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.

At the end of that time, they completed their calculations and determined that the average business owner or executive—who professed that sales were “absolutely essential” to survival and growth—was spending only 11 percent of his time on sales and marketing.

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 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.

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.

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.

When you increase your levels of sales activity, you also activate the Law of Probabilities to work on your behalf. You tap

This principle says that, 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.

when a salesperson doubles the number of minutes that he or she spends face to face or ear to ear with customers, that salesperson’s sales double as well.

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.

To achieve high levels of sales success, you must discipline yourself to plan your days and weeks in advance.

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.

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.

First of all, keep your funnel full. Always have more prospects to call on than you have time during the day. Never let your funnel become empty. Never run out of prospects.

Second, get better at each stage of selling. Study, read, listen to audio programs, and upgrade your skills in prospecting, presenting, and closing sales.

Discipline yourself to make your first call early in the morning, by 7:00 or 8:00 A.M. When you start your day with a face-to-face sales call, you will be more energized and motivated to continue selling all day long.

Many salespeople, because of their fear of rejection, spread their calls out over a large geographical area and then convince themselves that they are actually working when they are really simply driving from call to call.

You are working only when you are ear to ear or face to face with someone who can and will buy within a reasonable period of time. At all other times, you are “unemployed.