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CHAPTER 1

Why Don’t I Do What I Know I Should Do?

“Why don’t I do what I know I should do?” Ask this question of yourself. Ask seriously because the answer controls your future. Until you start doing what you know you should do, you’re living under a law against success that you’ve imposed on yourself.

Behind that question stands this challenge: “How can I cause myself to do what I know I should do?” I’ll soon tell you how, but first take time to understand the why.

You’ve frequently asked yourself questions like the two above. Everyone in sales has, except the top producers (who are doing what they know they should do) and the defeated (who’ve trained themselves not to ask anymore). You’re not a member of that last group for many important reasons I can’t know about, and for one that I do: You’re reading these words. This means that you’ve opened your mind to new and possibly disturbing ideas that you’re willing to change your way of doing things whenever you discover a change that’ll help.

When you began your new selling career, what did you have a big supply of?

Enthusiasm.

Do you remember? Burning desire. Excitement. The feeling of Watch out, world, here I come. Now that I’ve got this terrific opportunity in sales, there’s no limit to what I can do.

Yes, you had enthusiasm and desire then. Yes, you were eager and excited about what you were going to do. No problem getting out of bed in the morning: You were raring to go. You had everything necessary for success except one item: knowledge. You simply didn’t know what you were doing. But that was okay; your enthusiasm made up for it.

Then what happened?

Some months passed. You learned your product, your way around the territory, how accounts are found, what the challenges are. But while you gathered that knowledge, what happened to your enthusiasm?

It dwindled a bit, didn’t it? But your product is still as fresh to new customers today as it was the day you started—it’s just not fresh to you anymore. You’ve had time not only to see the negatives that every industry, company, and product has, you’ve also had time to dwell on them, time to let these negatives influence your actions.

Your gain of knowledge merely matched your loss of enthusiasm, and balanced your performance out to about average—far below your potential. Make no mistake about it: Under your skin a Champion is struggling to get out. A front-runner. A big earner. A high flier.

So now you know what to do, but you aren’t doing it. Why? In most organizations, lack of the specific product knowledge required for that sales position isn’t the main issue among the salespeople who’ve been there for several months. It probably isn’t for you, either. Motivating yourself to do what you already know you should do is the main challenge.

Why is this true?

Because what you should do is not what you want to do. If it was, you’d be doing it.

Now we’ve come to the cutting edge:

Why don’t you want to do what you know you should do?

The reason you don’t is that you’re in conflict with yourself. This conflict comes about because the push forward of your wants and needs can’t overcome the push backward of your fears and anxieties.

A bit later, we’re going to study these wants and needs of yours in detail. Wants and needs are motivators, and everyone feels them. We’re also going to take a close look at the de-motivators that everyone also feels. When you feel a de-motivator, you feel fear or anxiety—which is why de-motivators are so powerful. They can dry your mouth, make your knees bang together like loose shutters in the wind, and light a fire in your stomach—or they can work in soft and subtle ways to kill your action. They’re powerful, all right. That’s why we’re going to study them.

Almost all success-seeking people have been torn by this conflict at some point in their careers, and most of us live with it all our active lives. Perhaps we can’t eliminate this ongoing battle. But we can decide whether we’ll lose every day, lose usually, win usually, or win every time. We can’t, of course, win every sale. Forces beyond our control will cost us a sale now and then. That’s okay. What isn’t okay is to constantly lose out to our same old unresolved fears and anxieties.

Think about that. In the privacy of your own thoughts, consider whether this conflict isn’t the chief obstacle to your being an outstanding success. Not lack of ability, not lack of product knowledge, but simply nonperformance of what you know you should do because of conflict.

Resolving these fears and anxieties is surprisingly easy when you know how to do it. The first requirement is to admit that you’re like everyone else—you have them. They may not show on the outside. But the people around you have them, and you have them. Recognizing this fact is the first gate you have to go through. The next one is to decide that you’re not going to let those beatable fears and anxieties stand between you and what you want in life.

When you’ve made that decision, read on. Explore how you get depressed. Study this enemy and find the weak point you’ll strike at to eliminate it. Learn about the motivators and how to use them; about the de-motivators and how to defeat them. Then you’ll start doing what you know you should do. You’ll do that naturally and without great strain because you want to.

How You Get Depressed

Do you ever get down? Do you ever have times when you just can’t get up and make yourself do what you know you should do? Days when you’d just as soon drive right by the office, not call in, and hide? Ever have that feeling? Let me show you how you got that feeling.

It’s a safe bet that you wouldn’t be in the profession of selling if you weren’t interested in making money. And it’s an equally safe bet that you’ll agree with this statement: I don’t make as much money when I’m depressed as I do when I’m enthusiastic.

If you accept that, I think you’ll go along with this idea: If I can decrease the time I’m depressed, and increase the time I’m enthusiastic, I’ll make more money.

Notice that I haven’t said, “Increase your enthusiasm and you’ll automatically decrease your depression.” Thousands of sales meetings every month prove that the pep imparted from the stage is lost before the depressed salespeople in the group get out the door. On the rust of conflict-caused depression, you can spray any amount of enthusiasm—and it always flakes off. But enthusiasm does stick to alertness, knowledge, and purpose. That’s why I make this assertion in complete confidence: “Decrease your depression and you’ll automatically increase your enthusiasm.” Compare the two quotation-marked sentences in this paragraph. The difference between these deceptively similar statements is enormous: The second one works, the first doesn’t. Following the first statement produces the slim pickings of failure; following the second produces the riches and satisfactions of success.

Certainly, build your enthusiasm by every reasonable means. But before you throw yourself into that useful activity, make sure your enthusiasm will have a clean surface to stick to. Sandblast the rust of depression off your brain first.

To do that, you need to know exactly how you get depressed.

Let’s take a close look at the conflict that starts a frustration that grows until it depresses you. I call this whole process “forging the chain of depression” because it is a series of events. As with any chain, to destroy its holding power you need break only one link. Here is the process by which you’ve been forging the chain of depression within yourself— the steps to getting down:

1. Conscious of your wants and needs, you motivate yourself—and move forward. Imagine yourself starting the engine of a high-powered sports car.

2. Conscious of your fears and anxieties, you de-motivate yourself—and are stopped. Your sports car is sitting in mud up to its hubcaps; the drive wheels are spinning but you aren’t going anywhere.

3. Some of the salespeople around you are moving ahead—but you aren’t and your frustration mounts rapidly. You see what they are doing, you know what you should do, but the more you want to, the harder it is to make yourself do it. In the sports car, you gun the engine and throw lots of mud. But you don’t move. Instead, you dig yourself in deeper. Your frustration runs into the red, and you pound the wheel angrily.

4. Because you aren’t able to close sales and move forward to satisfy your wants and needs, you lose faith in your product and company or—what’s much worse—in yourself. When any of these things happen, the frustration eating at you turns into depression. It’s as though you give up trying to gun your sports car out of the mud, shut off the engine, and step out into the muck to go it on foot.

5. Now you’re too depressed to take any effective course of action on your own, and you’ll remain in that immobile state until some outside force moves you out of it.

A sports car driver, confronted by the simple mechanical problem described, would immediately squish off through the mud in search of a tow. But we’re slower to go looking for help when confounded by depression in sales work because the solution to our situation isn’t obvious. In fact, we might not even recognize that we have a common challenge, one that can readily be resolved.

If you’re depressed now about your sales performance, ever have been in the past, or think it’s possible that you could be in the future, you need to review the sources of motivation.

The Motivators

The first motivator of the great salesperson is money. Why is money a motivator? It allows you to get the things you want and need. Money is good. Repeat that out loud.

Money is good.

Money Is Good,

MONEY IS GOOD.

Money is good so long as what you earn is in direct proportion to the service you give. It’s good, but money by itself won’t make you happy. All that money can do is give you opportunities to explore what will make you happy. And while you’re searching, you’ll be a lot happier with money than without it, don’t you agree?

The way to get more money is to change the “s” in the word Service into a dollar sign: $ervice. This is because the amount of money you earn is totally dictated by the amount and level of service you provide to others. Money is what I call a scoreboard reflection of the service you give. If you aren’t making enough money, you aren’t giving enough service.

The second motivator is security. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is the foundation of most motivational courses. This theory teaches that the average human being strives daily to supply physical needs, that is, to obtain security. In a primitive society, security might be a flock of goats and a weatherproof cave or tent; in our society, security is something bought with money. Without money, you can’t buy clothes. If you ran around naked, would you agree that you’d feel somewhat insecure? If you aren’t wearing the right quality and style of clothes for a given occasion, you also feel insecure. Money buys a wide variety of possessions that to some degree provide us with a feeling of security. So money is a tremendous motivator, both as a direct measure of success and as a provider of a sense of security.

Achievement is the third motivator. Almost everyone wants to achieve, but almost no one wants to do what’s necessary to achieve. I believe that people everywhere are broken into two groups: achievers and non-achievers.

Achievers make up only 5 percent of the world, and non-achievers account for the other 95 percent. This is explained by the fact that a non-achiever is achieving non-achievement, which is an achievement for the non-achiever. So non-achievers find it all too easy to accept their failure to achieve anything of real worth and meaning. People who have nothing are usually achieving what they think they deserve: nothing.

Many of us were raised in environments where our loved ones, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, were wonderful and upstanding people. They also might be non-achievers.

If so, that’s okay—for them.

We’re achievement-oriented, but maybe we’ve learned from non-achievers in our own families, and adopted the characteristics of non-achievement. Let’s not concern ourselves here with trying to rescue any of your loved ones who might be non-achievers—because it can’t be done. The will to achieve is not something that can be imposed on anyone from the outside; that drive must come from within. You have that drive or you wouldn’t be reading these words. Your example may inspire your loved ones. Your success may make it possible for you to open doors to knowledge and opportunity for them. But you can’t force the will to achieve on them. You can’t achieve anything of lasting worth by pushing a non-achiever through doors of knowledge and opportunity if that person isn’t eager to stride through.

Are you ready to throw off being a non-achiever? Are you ready to join that elite 5 percent of the population who earn the right to enjoy the delicacies of society?

Look at this from another perspective as well. Everyone you know also wants achievement. If what you offer, through your products and services, helps them achieve what they’re after, they’ll in turn help you with what you wish to achieve.

Through seminars, audio programs, videos, and this book, I’ve been fortunate enough to train people who are tired of being average, people who are ready and willing to join the elite, people who want to reach out for more, people who are ready to make the investment in personal change and effort. I hope you’ve decided that it’s time to quit messing around being average, time to stop wallowing in the quagmire of mediocrity, time to reach out for the greatness that’s inherent in all human beings.

The fourth motivator is recognition. This is an interesting motivator—one I often think is the most important to our breed of sales folks. People will do more for recognition than for anything else. Everyone needs recognition: husbands, wives, children—even your boss. We all do. When you were young, why did you do cartwheels out in the backyard? What did you want to get?

Recognition. “Hey, Mommy and Daddy, look at me. I’m doing great!”

In our search for recognition as adults, we play far more complex games. The cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the restaurants we dine in, the places we travel to, and a host of other things along those lines are all devices that we use to seek recognition.

We can argue that most of these things are necessities. Perhaps. We can claim to enjoy these things for themselves. Certainly. But without the need for recognition, would we be so obsessed with style and personalization?

We all crave and require recognition. That’s why this motivator has such awesome power when it’s used at full throttle. Many sales managers boost their sales force’s performance more with recognition than with any other motivator. Even more managers get scant benefit from it because they give too little too late and too carelessly. To be effective on a sales force, recognition must be real. It must be prompt. It must be given with sincerity and without favoritism. Its quality or value must be in line with what was achieved.

Acceptance by others is motivator number five, and this is a dangerous one.

Do you know how many people strive every day to be accepted by everyone else? With many people, including many in sales, that’s their greatest motivation—and their greatest weakness. But we all want to be liked, don’t we?

Now, here’s an interesting thing that happens to every new salesperson regardless of the product or service. When you’re brand new to your company (and maybe you’re also new to the profession of selling) and first go into your new sales job all loaded with enthusiasm, who’s sitting there waiting to accept or reject you?

Is it the achievers or the non-achievers who’re parked there? Is it the Five Percent or the Ninety-Five Percent?

Which group lives in the office? Which group is out running for more business?

The chances are good that someone will say, “Now, let me tell you how things really stand around here.” When that happens, you’d think there’s one chance in twenty of that someone being an achiever, but in fact you may not even see the achievers for weeks. They’re busy doing the things that make them great. When you’re finally introduced to one of the Five Percent, they’ll say something like this and not much more: “Glad to have you with us. This is a terrific company, and you’re going to do great here. Nice meeting you. See you later.”

Some people in your company will tell you that my training won’t help you. Without giving these concepts and techniques a fair trial, they’ll say that. After merely skimming these pages looking for something to ridicule, some of them will say that. Without even cracking this book open, a few will say that. These people are the losers, and they want you to join them. The last thing they want you to do is join the winners. To show why this is so important to them, let’s get on the case of Jack Bumyears.

Jack’s been in the sales department of your new firm for almost eleven years now—and he hasn’t learned a new sales technique in 120 months. When you start, everyone from the company president on down wants you to succeed—except Jack and his friends. Every time someone new comes whistling in from nowhere and makes good, Jack is faced with a hard question: “This new jerk did it. Why can’t I?”

Bumyears knows the answer to that question as well as anyone does: Jack is a non-achiever because Jack refuses to be effective. But that’s the one answer Jack can’t accept. To do so would be admitting to himself that his work habits and methods must be drastically changed before he can succeed. Too painful, too frightening to think about. Far easier to blame the newcomer’s success on favoritism, pure dumb luck, a lack of ethics—anything that will steer the guilt away from Jack’s shoulders.

But no matter how ingenious Jack’s been about excuses, no matter how much time and effort he puts into keeping those excuses tight, the truth is always in there, gnawing to be free.

After this happens a time or two, Jack automatically develops anxiety whenever a newcomer shows promise. Alert, hardworking, eager-to-learn people have a nasty habit of succeeding quickly, Jack learns, and that always forces him into another agonizing search for an acceptable explanation. The pain reaches down into Jack’s subconscious mind and demands relief. Then Jack begins to act on a sad and false belief: That the best way to cope with other people’s success is not to have any of it around. Soon he’s attained a high level of non-achievement by becoming skilled at stifling ambition among his peers. When a new person says, “Well, I’d better get going. I have a bunch of calls to make,” old Jack will reply with, “At this time of day? You’ll never find anyone in.”

Every weakness detected in an eager person is deftly exploited. “You having a problem with your paperwork? The company has made it too hard to get it right. You’ll always have problems with it.”