Tag: sales

First time

1:43am this is my first time truly leading a hospice operation. I have been around hospice for over 20 years. I have been a director before. I am know what it takes to be successful. What good care looks like. but this is the first time I am in control. When I was the chaplain or in sales I didn’t control clinical services. The first time I was a director I wasn’t engaged. The second time I didn’t have time to get settled. I am in control. I expect excellence from people who represent me. I do not give up.

It takes a team

Change and growth is impossible on your own. Staying focused and motivated by yourself is impossible. We are emotional creatures. We base almost all our decisions on how we feel. As a result we are a mess of contradictory objectives. When the pressure is on, the boss is looking at my numbers, or wants to see a report, hear a presentation, when I am accountable I am scared. When I am scared I am motivated.
Hopes and dreams come at us at all times. We seldom can control our emotions. Because we are constantly taking in information and processing our goals and motivations change constantly. They can become opposed in an instant.
You might say on one hand I don’t want to have to work hard. Then almost with the very next though think about how you want to accomplish more. I quit the highest paying job I ever had because I did not travel six days a week. My priority changed. Would I make the same decision now? I am not sure. I am more apt at staying in pressure but at the same time I was sacrificing for the money. I missed my home, my family.
This scenario plays out large and small all the time. One second I want to reach my sales quota and then 30 seconds later I feel tired and wish I could cut out early and go watch a movie. You may want to move one second and then the next want to stay a couple more years where you are at. To stay focused takes more than just you working on your own, it takes a team.

On trial

I am kind of having a crisis of identity. I notice I write these posts on Monday mornings. I am working sales but I hate going to sales meetings with nothing to show for it. On trial and failure. I guess everyone would do it if it were easy?

I feel anxiety gripping my throat. I can’t breathe. I can’t move forward and get a ‘win.’ I can’t let go and accept defeat. I put myself in this situation thinking it was sink or swim. Who knew there was a third option. Just get ground down. I hate doing sales when there are no sales.

Skills

Being a chaplain requires certain credentials, skills, training and experience. I possessed those things in the spring of 2003.

Consequently I took a job as a hospice chaplain. I was assigned a group of patients already on service to provide spiritual care. As more patients came on I provided care to them as well. In the course of my duties I was asked to conduct worship services, funerals, weddings, baptisms and various other tasks of the clergy. It was a job I had spent years developing the skills necessary to conduct.

I did not have to think about drumming up business, finding customers or selling people on my offering. When I took the job more than enough opportunity was given to me. As I continued to work and became known in the community the ancillary requests increased as well.

I stopped working as a chaplain In the fall of 2009. I longed for adventure and competition. Two things being a chaplain did not provide. I went into sales.

In sales the goal was specifically to drum up business, increase market share and find new customers. I am not sure how good I was at sales. However, I did possess a skill for getting sales jobs.

I was good at applying, getting interviews, being offered positions and moving up in salary and rank. From the time I left being a chaplain to the spring of 2017 I had tripled my salary and held executive leadership positions.

Now I scribble blog posts and advocate for objective focused growth. I was paid a salary as a chaplain and as a sales leader. I made money because my skills were seen as valuable. I was paid a regular salary in exchange for my loyalty to the company and cause.

How to I survive doing this?

I am an introverted person. My writing is personal and reflective. Does it appeal to anyone else? How do I consistently share it in a way that is mutually beneficial to the writer and reader?

“It can’t be done”

The market is too saturated we don’t have the right features, I wasn’t trained. If you have worked in sales you know all the excuses for failure.

I know. I have managed many sales people. I have heard all the excuses. I have also been a sales person. I have used the excuses.

In the end there were only the jobs I hit my objective and was rewarded and jobs I missed my objective and was dismissed. I have been fired many times. I haven’t to use a baseball teen batted 1.000.

In sports the objective is clearer. You can say the defense was too hard or you didn’t have a good scheme but in the end you still didn’t score or win the game. Emotionally we naturally gravitate to excuses because they relieve the tension.

Even as you are reading this you are thinking he is a hard ass, he is too narrow focused I don’t like this all or nothing attitude. You are going back to the squares and seeing what is easiest to see and accept. And if you do what you have always done you get what you always got.

Don’t look at life as an emotional have and have not. Identify your objective, strive for it, achieve it or not then set the next objective. In your career and business life you will be much more focused and stress free.

Objective mechanism

Objective = $200,000 annual

The objective could be ANYTHING but without a mechanism I cannot achieve it.

I have drive and focus.

I discovered them working to achieve a sales quota at a job I am working.

But the position I am in will not deliver the objective.

Or will it?

I could exceed my quota. Move up in the company, continue to be successful, move up until I run the company. That would achieve the objective.

Conditioned for Specific Results

A sports team has one objective, to win a championship. Failure to do so immediately or quickly usually results in dismissal of personnel. Every once in a while subjective metrics or barriers perceived out of the norm will buy time but the quest for a championship is a zero sum business. Achieve the objective or be replaced.
The same is true for most sales people, corporate officers or any business in general. The specific objective of sales, revenue and profit must be achieved or you will be dismissed and replaced.
In order to achieve the results you wish your mind must be conditioned to not only exist but thrive in a high pressure situation that demands specific results.