Your Sales Productivity Depends on Whether Sales is A Job or Profession

Someone posed the question: Based on your years of experience, if I could only give one piece of advice what would it be?

Decide early on whether sales is a job or career. If it is a career don't let anyone control the rate at which you learn. Focus on improving your sales productivity, sales effectiveness and efficiency. Buy books and training programs, go to seminars, read blogs, white papers, and articles to stay current and uncover new trends.

Learn, learn, learn! Become a learning machine. Google everything you don't understand and everything you think you understand.

Learn about your: clients, customers, prospects, market, products and competitors. If your company offers sales training or implements new sales tools, be an early adopter. Don't whine and complain, get after it and figure out what you need to figure out in order to improve your sales performance. Learn about the sales process, strategy and tactics. Learn what works and why it works.

Learn how to measure your own sales performance. Learn how to identify, track and trend your key performance indicators (activities and results). Learn what it means to be productive, efficient and effective.

Learn how to ask good questions and how to listen. Learn about your client's, customer's, and/or prospect's buying process, their customers and competitors. Learn what they value and how to connect what you hear and understand about them to your solution.

Sales is one of the best careers in the world. It warrants the effort it takes to become an elite high performance professional. Development is a process not an event, so develop a life long mindset of continuous performance improvement and actively seek out mentors along the way.

Never stop learning how to improve your sales performance! Focus on improving your sales effectiveness, sales productivity and efficiency.