I am involved in various businesses to do with stuttering therapies, how to become a foster parent and cost reduction experts.

Success in business has nothing whatsoever to do with salesmanship, little to do with a knowledge of your company’s products or services.

To be or to not be a success is basically down to some standard practices; this is true in business and in your personal life.

They are your A,B,C’s, Attitude, Belief and Consistency. Taking them in reverse order.

Consistency

We get up every morning, we brush our teeth wash, get dressed have breakfast. We are consistent in our actions. We do it every day. It does not really matter how many days we choose to work but it is important that we are consistent with the way in which we work. We need the 6 marbles in our left pocket or left side of our bag and transfer 1 marble to the other side every time we have carried out a positive action i.e. seeing a customer, talking to someone about the business, etc. etc. We need to do it consistently. We need to have transferred all 6 marbles (better still 10) by the end of the day. We need to concentrate on the actions not on the result. I’ll repeat that, we need to concentrate on the actions not on the results.

When we go mountain climbing, if we would continually look at the summit we would soon trip up and fall. We need to concentrate on every step at a time, one after the other and as surely as the sun goes down we will reach our summit.

Belief

An absolute and genuine belief in our business, it’s products and services and what it can give it’s customers.

Attitude

Possibly the most important of these three but useless on its own. It’s no good having the best attitude in the world if one’s sitting on one’s own in a closed room not talking to anyone. So what is attitude apart from how one feels about oneself and others. I describe it like this.

Your face is transparent, totally transparent and your attitude shines through whether it’s positive or negative. The first second that a prospective customer sees you maybe even before you see him, your attitude comes through. The customer sees it, maybe only subconsciously and will react accordingly. We all know that the first thing any salesperson has to sell is themselves even before they open their mouth. If they can’t sell themselves they might as well turn round and go home and go back to bed. People who are unable to sell themselves will not be able to sell even the most basic of items.