Introduction

Why are you here?

You are here because something is nagging at you. I won’t presume to know you or your work yet, but I do know what is nagging at you. It’s uncertainty.

Uncertainty arises because, for most of us, growth feels elusive. You not only want to grow your business, you need to. Either your job or your ability to eat hangs in the balance. But you are unsure where to start. Or you have been starting, and trying, but nothing seems to be working. It all feels too hard sometimes, and you have got a whole lot of unanswered questions . . . What does a good sales process look like? Why do I always lose sales to competitors? How do I know I am a good salesperson? Will I get the results this company needs? What are the right kinds of targets to set?

See? Uncertainty.

You don’t need to feel that way anymore. Here, you have a resource designed to help you build a foundation of basic habits that will help you grow your business with certainty. A book that will, simply put, help you to get more sales and win more business. And that is what we are all here for.

And who are you? You are a business person. You may be a business owner. You may be a salesperson. You may be an entrepreneur just starting out. Whichever identity you associate with — or it might be something different altogether — you are a person who wants to contribute to the growth of the business you are involved in. So, what do you need in order to do this?

The one skill that you must master – the one key element on which the rest of a business is built – is sales.

Like it or not, sales make the world go around.

I am sure I don’t need to tell you, though, that business is complex and often tough, and sales even more so. You might have taken things to the best level you are able to reach on your own. You may be struggling to scale or be experiencing bottlenecks. Maybe you are just tired; you have carried the future of the business alone for so long that you just wish it wasn’t all on your shoulders to succeed. Or perhaps you have a sneaking suspicion that you could be doing things better.

You have taken the proactive step of picking up this book, because you have got a vision and at least a couple of big, ambitious goals that are helping you to get out of bed each morning. You want to do better, and you want to be better.

The vision you have, for yourself and this business, is far from impossible. You can achieve the growth you desire – of that I am certain – but this will only happen if you do the right things, and do them consistently.

Why ‘mind, momentum and mastery’?

What I would really like to tell you here is that the secret of sales success is discipline. I firmly believe that if you do the right things, and keep doing them, even if you don’t do them all that well, sales growth will result. I believe, too, that the discipline of sales is something — and, in fact, one of the best things — that any of us can learn, regardless of where we work within a business.

But I realise that all of that isn’t very sexy. Nor is it likely the answer that you are looking for. So, what I will do instead is share with you the principles that are key to unlocking a business’s potential for growth. Those principles are mind, momentum and mastery.

While there are a multitude of business problems we could tackle, this book focuses on growth, and the things to focus on for the best results in your limited time. Business is complex, but, in the same way that we categorise and reduce information from the great wide world down into portions that make sense for us, we can do so with the path to business growth.

The key ingredients for business growth are:

• conquering your mind
• creating and building momentum, and
• developing mastery over time — striving to continually improve, and avoiding the complacency that prevents us from working to be better and better.

We know that 80 per cent of sales success – and virtually any success in life – starts with having our mind right. How you choose to get up and go about your day, on the majority of your days, sets your path. Once the intention and the attitude are there, you need to know what to do. Consistently doing the wrong things is never going to get you the right results, so it really is vital to know what you need to do to create the right type of momentum. Here your habits and your process will matter.

And lastly, once you are no longer stuck, how do you build on your success? They say that if you are not moving forward, you are going backwards, so in order to stay competitive and stay relevant it is imperative to make time to be better, and to seek out things that will help you to change and grow.

Without any one of these things — mind, momentum, mastery — you won’t succeed. But, if you do each of them, you will be growing even before you know it. Three principles — mind, momentum, mastery — the ‘3x way’ to grow your business.

So, who am I?

I guess before we go much further I should more properly introduce myself.

My very first ever sales role was selling candy door-to-door to raise money for children’s charities. I was 12 years old. One day a week, a big 12-seater van would pick us kids up after school, before dropping us off in pairs to canvass the street with an adult chaperone. I can’t honestly say that I learned much about selling at that stage, but I assume it helped my confidence.

By 17, I had left home, school and the comparative safety of a ‘real’ job, and started my first commission-only sales role, selling home alarm systems. There was no salary. No wages. No fall-back or safety net. I sold or I went hungry. Every morning I would turn up at a plain building in an industrial area, where we would have a quick meeting about what we would achieve that day, and then get our area assigned. As the newbie, I got the poor areas where the residents couldn’t really afford what we were selling. We would head out and door-knock until dark; it was pretty gruelling stuff.

Nonetheless, in my first month I was the highest-selling new recruit in Australasia. I got promoted to a senior position early, which meant I had my own team. Ultimately, though, it didn’t work out, and I left the position – although not before I had experienced the dreaded ‘sales slump’ for the first time and gone hungry for many weeks. I ran out of money and started eating just one meal a day – two-minute noodles on toast. A gaunt 17-year-old is not a good look, and my mum said I had to get a real job with a salary, so temporarily I left the sales game.

Eventually, I went back to sales, and took sales positions that had salaries plus bonus and commission structures. I have sold retail, advertising and media space, marketing solutions, design, signage solutions, IT solutions, websites and more. I have done door-to-door selling, cold-calling, appointment-setting, following up leads, selling by appointment, boardroom negotiations, tenders, closing and others forms of selling. There isn’t a role in selling that I haven’t done – non-complex sales, complex sales and somewhere in between.

I have done the whole process from start to finish in many industries, and in most of the companies I have worked for I have been a (or the) top-performing salesperson. In fact, for a few of them my records still stand many years later.

Like most people, I don’t really enjoy the door-to-door or cold-calling aspects of sales. I love first meetings, building trust over time and closing deals. I love making deals and helping my clients. I don’t think there is any career that is more ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ than sales, which can be hard.

We all think that what we do is nothing special or particularly remarkable, until someone else’s inability or challenge with it shines a light on our ability or competence. Ultimately, I have realised that while I am a terrible sales manager, I am really good at helping businesses make more sales. Not just as a salesperson, but as a problem-solver. Working out what has been going wrong and putting it right. I soon realised I could have a much bigger impact in the world by helping more businesses problem-solve and improve their sales than I could working as a salesperson for myself or one or two companies. So now I am a consultant, and am trying my hand at being an author.

So that is how this book came about: lots of people coming to me and saying ‘I just don’t know what to do’, which made me realise I had something. And the results I was able to help them achieve further proved it.

This isn’t just a smooth-sailing success story, though. I didn’t always know what to do either. I have also had the dire results that occur when you simply don’t do what you need to do, despite knowing what you should be doing. I will share plenty of those moments, too. The rough with the smooth — that’s how we all learn and grow.

Your secret weapon

Although the discipline of sales sometimes seems elusive and can appear much like a dark art, it is not magic, and unfortunately there is no special trick. You simply have to roll up your sleeves and do the work, but, if you do that, the results will follow. You will find yourself making more sales.

While there may not be a special trick or a magic bullet, you are holding in your hands the very next best thing: a secret weapon. Here, I will share the practical ‘to do’s to unlock growth through sales; the methods by which to begin conquering your mind, building momentum and achieving mastery. Successful growth requires consistent effort and a simple foundation of basic habits and processes. And I am going to take the pain out of starting and show you exactly what you need to do.

There are practical exercises for those who like to learn by doing – developing the key skills that we are exploring. Some of the activities may seem challenging, but they work. I will make sure we have some fun along the way, too.

For others, those who like to read and think, there will be plenty to ponder within the sections that follow. All I ask is that you still peruse the exercises throughout, and consider how they might apply to your business; you may be surprised by how much value these can add. After all, change will require you to do something eventually.

The resources section is a bigger-picture exploration of your sales strategy and your competitive environment. I recommend that you read the book in its entirety, and complete the exercises, before tackling the strategy resources at the back. If you are armed with the concepts in the book, you will be much better prepared to think about your growth – and sales – strategically.