If you are in business, you are a salesperson. In any kind of business, you can’t help someone until they hire you. You can’t help them fix their back, rebalance their thyroid or gain more balance in their liver. Before you can be amazing at what you do, you have to be amazing at sales. Nothing happens until someone buys something.

A salesperson, like a good athlete, realizes that to be successful they must undertake a variety of skill-building activities on a daily basis. An Olympic Runner might test his time, different shoes and the terrain to constantly determine the optimum environment for him to operate in. Salespeople are no different.

By creating a “tool box” of techniques, they can assure successful sales performance. Unfortunately, we cannot control who buys, but we can control the activities that will “create a buying environment”. Any salesperson or business owner should consider making “actual” contact with 20 new people daily. This is primarily due to the fact that you will lose 13 to 17 percent of your clients every year, through no fault of your own.

By committing to a “minimum daily” set of activities, you can assure that you will consistently be loading opportunities into your “sales funnel” and can take advantage of the “Frictional Business Theory”, which states that in a prospecting environment you might, “just happen to call someone” who “just happens to need what you are selling” that might have otherwise not known you existed had you not reached out to them. Think “dialing for dollars” and this might become your favorite sales activity.

Don Zavis is an accomplished executive with a successful history of taking private and public organizations, including small local Tucson businesses, to new levels of sales and profitability. Connect with him at 248-497-5869, [email protected] or DonZavis.com. See ad, page 17.