In the last several years, I have had a revelation about the art and science of sales. The answer to sales success is within all of us. The answer is simple but the key to unlock the answer is elusive.

If you were to go back to the late 1800s, the first formal sales training provided by the likes of J. Edward Douglas and others, you will find teaching geared toward techniques - tie-downs, inverted tie-downs, etc. For more than a century now, sales people have been trained with various forms of techniques, word tracks, closes and other sales processes. Do these things work? Is this what creates success for the best performing sales people? My own unscientific research says no.

For more than 25 years I have been involved in sales and sales training reaching the highest levels of success. I have read more than 250 books and listened to hundreds of CDs on sales. I am considered a world-class expert on sales, but I am just now tapping into a higher level of consciousness in the arena. My conclusion is that most of what you have been taught about sales and use on a daily basis is not what creates the highest levels of success.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Tipping Point,” Gladwell describes theory and various supporting research about human behavior and how people make decisions. The author uses the term “small slicing” to describe the idea that substantial and correct information can be obtained about a person and his or her future behavior based on small slices of their communication and current behavior. The information in this book supports theories and research that I have had for the last several years. However, the theories are hard to articulate and get others to model. The key to success is simple but hard to define.

The old phrases, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” and “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” are examples of simple truths. The magic answers to how do you make a great first impression and how do you say things correctly are what are much harder to define.

Sales techniques, sales processes and word tracks can all be helpful but are not the key to peak performance. If those things were the answer then everyone who ever had sales training or had modeled a successful sales person would become peak performers. That’s not the case.

Even the words “sales” and “selling” create a false direction for sales people. The proper mindset for a sales person is to think of very personal interaction with buyers. The mission of a sales person is to create an environment conducive to buying for the customer. TLC - think like a customer. Not just any customer - the particular customer you are with now. One-size-fits-all selling does not work.

The so-called road to a sale or sales process is only as good as the personal interaction of the sales person with the customer during the process. This is why training on just sales process without education in understanding interpersonal communication, behavior or the art and science of persuasion creates a sales environment of failure for sales people and frustration for customers.

Think more about the customer’s thoughts and emotions and how they are being expressed to you. To create a buying environment for the customer, you must take all your senses and intuition to a higher level. You must begin to see like a deaf person, hear like a blind person and understand the customer as if you were his or her deepest and most caring friend.

In the last several years, I have had a revelation about the art and science of sales. The answer to sales success is within all of us. The answer is simple but the key to unlock the answer is elusive.

If you were to go back to the late 1800s, the first formal sales training provided by the likes of J. Edward Douglas and others, you will find teaching geared toward techniques - tie-downs, inverted tie-downs, etc. For more than a century now, sales people have been trained with various forms of techniques, word tracks, closes and other sales processes. Do these things work? Is this what creates success for the best performing sales people? My own unscientific research says no.

For more than 25 years I have been involved in sales and sales training reaching the highest levels of success. I have read more than 250 books and listened to hundreds of CDs on sales. I am considered a world-class expert on sales, but I am just now tapping into a higher level of consciousness in the arena. My conclusion is that most of what you have been taught about sales and use on a daily basis is not what creates the highest levels of success.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Tipping Point,” Gladwell describes theory and various supporting research about human behavior and how people make decisions. The author uses the term “small slicing” to describe the idea that substantial and correct information can be obtained about a person and his or her future behavior based on small slices of their communication and current behavior. The information in this book supports theories and research that I have had for the last several years. However, the theories are hard to articulate and get others to model. The key to success is simple but hard to define.

The old phrases, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” and “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” are examples of simple truths. The magic answers to how do you make a great first impression and how do you say things correctly are what are much harder to define.

Sales techniques, sales processes and word tracks can all be helpful but are not the key to peak performance. If those things were the answer then everyone who ever had sales training or had modeled a successful sales person would become peak performers. That’s not the case.

Even the words “sales” and “selling” create a false direction for sales people. The proper mindset for a sales person is to think of very personal interaction with buyers. The mission of a sales person is to create an environment conducive to buying for the customer. TLC - think like a customer. Not just any customer - the particular customer you are with now. One-size-fits-all selling does not work.

The so-called road to a sale or sales process is only as good as the personal interaction of the sales person with the customer during the process. This is why training on just sales process without education in understanding interpersonal communication, behavior or the art and science of persuasion creates a sales environment of failure for sales people and frustration for customers.

Think more about the customer’s thoughts and emotions and how they are being expressed to you. To create a buying environment for the customer, you must take all your senses and intuition to a higher level. You must begin to see like a deaf person, hear like a blind person and understand the customer as if you were his or her deepest and most caring friend.

If you would like seven quick tips to start you on the road to higher sales success, email me with the phrase “7 quick tips” in the subject line.

When you have a first encounter with a customer, they are usually wondering one simple question. Can I trust you?

There are three stages of buying:
1. Character and Trust
2. Emotion
3. Logic

I don’t know that one stage is more important than the other but I do know that the trust stage usually happens first. When you build a house and the foundation is weak, no matter how nice a house you build it comes crumbling down eventually. A sale is the same way. You can sell all you want. You can create an emotional frenzy. You can justify emotions with logic and reasoning but at the end if the customer has a twinge of doubt about you they will pause and hesitate to complete the sale.

Usually when the customer stalls after showing all the right buying signs, we blame the customer and create some unflattering names for him or her. Here’s a news fl ash: Most of the time it’s your fault. It’s not the customer’s job to trust you. It’s not the customer’s job to create a rapport and a bond. It’s not the customer’s job.

Often, the customer comes in sold on your product and has a need and desire for it. They want to buy it. But when it gets to the end, one thing keeps them from buying - fear. Fear of making a mistake. Your customers are human. Customer’s have fears of making a mistake in buying the wrong vehicle, getting the wrong price, getting the wrong information or having a bad experience.

To sell more, you must allow the customer to buy. To buy a customer needs a path without obstacles and doubt. To remove the customer’s doubts and fear you must practice risk aversion and reversal.

Sales training has focused primarily on handling objections and other reactive selling approaches. Practicing risk aversion is a proactive approach to selling that addresses common fears up front and removes them before the become an obstacle. Fifteen minutes spent on proactive risk aversion can eliminate two hours of reactive objection handling.

Take a pencil and paper and write down all the common fears of your customers and common objections you receive. Write down the silent objections you don’t get but you know are really there. No matter what you sell, it’s the same objections over and over. It doesn’t take that much to be aware of the objections, to be prepared to proactively eliminate them and even answer them if they still come up.

Listen to what customers say and what they are trying to say. Listen to what customers really mean. And, listen to what customers aren’t saying but intuitively you know they are thinking. Increasing your intuitive ability is a major step in becoming a master sales person. Watch your customer’s body language. You don’t need a course to teach you what people are thinking by their body language. You simply need to observe, think and feel as they do. TLC - Think Like a Customer.

Remember, that trust comes before money.

Every year at the National Automobile Dealers Convention, the exhibit hall is full of Customer Relationship Management and Business Development Center companies displaying their wares. Dealers spend massive amounts of money in a frenzy to buy the “magic button” CRM or BDC solution for many reasons. Unfortunately most of those reasons aren’t valid. Putting great tools in the hands of below average people with below average processes and little to no accountability equals a waste of money.

Let’s look at some of the underlying reasons why dealers buy these tools. Dealers see their dealer friends, fellow twenty group members and competitors buying these tools and feel the peer pressure to “keep up with the Jones’s.” Dealers start reading trade magazines and attending programs where a lot of the conversation is around customer relationship management and feel the force of momentum around this subject.

Unfortunately, I have been in thousands of dealerships across the country and can say without a doubt that in the majority of dealerships, between 80-90% of CRM’s or BDC’s functionality is not being used. Great technology and great tools alone do not move a traditional dealership into the new age of selling. In most dealerships with CRM tools, incremental sales and service numbers are not improved and massive amounts of money are being wasted.

In almost thirty years in the business, I have witnessed the majority of dealerships putting massive amounts of time, energy and money on acquiring new customers and giving only lip service around the importance of existing customers. All research, data and plain logic shows that putting the emphasis on your existing customer base first will reward you more than any other single thing you can do.

I conduct interviews with dealer’s everyday and it’s hard to find a dealer who actually knows what their dealerships repeat sales numbers look like. Almost none of the dealers I interview can tell me what their sale to service retention percentage is. Very few dealers can give a detailed explanation of their CRM process and how it is carried out and even to what degree it is carried out. Embarrassingly, very few dealers can tell me specifically and convincingly why a customer should buy from their dealership versus their competitors.

The traditional entrepreneurial dealer focused only on push driven sales approaches is dead. Dealers have to be better business people than ever before. Gone are the days of being successful in spite of you. The margin for ignorance and operating error is slim.

Bury your old dealership and operating approach as you know it. Take the time to step away from your dealership and evaluate what you are doing versus what needs to be done. Evaluate the 4 P’s of your business – People, Process, Product and Positioning. Evaluate all the tools and technology you use and the effectiveness of those tools and the way they are being used or most likely not being used. You must integrate people and technology together into a cohesive sales and marketing process.

Many dealers will need to come to the conclusion that they will never be able to set up a traditional process with people carrying out all the functions they want them to. Most of your salespeople and managers are not capable or willing to do all the things you want them to do. The truth for those dealerships is that they never have and they never will. If this is your dealership, you may have to let go of your ego and design a process with job descriptions that can actually succeed. You may decide to remove some of the traditional functions and narrow the focus of each person on your team. I have often heard dealers say, “I expect my managers or salespeople to do these things.” In return, I always ask the dealer, “Do they, and if so how often?” Most of the time, the answer is either no or very little.

It’s very clear, gone are the days where a dealer can accept that expectations are not being met. You must either improve your people and accountability of those people or completely redesign your dealership with processes and benchmarks that can and will be executed and monitored. I invite dealers to stop playing victim by blaming your people for not executing. You hired them, you set up the process and you created the accountability or lack of it. Therefore, it’s your responsibility and your job to fix it.

To receive a F*REE Special Report titled “New Generation” and a series of articles around The Death of the Traditional Dealership” and “The Death of the Traditional Salesperson” email me at info@tewart.com with “New Generation” in the subject line.

Mark Tewart is a sales and automotive industry expert. Mark is also a professional speaker, trainer, consultant, entrepreneur and author of the best seller, How To Be A Sales Superstar. Mark is a member of The National Speakers Association and The Authors Guild

The managers in your company must have a written job description with clearly defined responsibilities and expectations.

Having specific goals for the department is required. Daily action plans for selling, training, appointments, one-on-one coaching, save-a deal meetings, deal structuring, follow-up, etc will increase sales by 20 percent without spending more for advertising.

If you read biographies of successful people or businesses, one common thread always seems to be a strong sense of passion fueled by big goals. When you write specific goals down on paper, you are committing yourself mentally, emotionally and physically to the attainment of those goals. Do your dealership and your employees set the long and short-term goals? As the dealer, have you committed your dreams to paper for the month, six months, a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years? Speed of the boss, speed of the crew, if you make the commitment, your employees will, too.

Once you have set your goals, plan your specific actions to reach them. Write a specific action plan for when to train, what to train on, who will conduct the training, how long the training will last and your expected goal of improvement for that area. Post a training schedule for the month and make it a monthly priority. Training is not a sometimes activity. It’s an everyday requirement.

Set goals for appointments and make action plans to reach those goals as a dealership. This requires goals and action plans for each sales person as to their activities to set daily appointments. Strive for and monitor appointments and watch your sales increase.

Every sales person should be coached daily in a one-on-one session. Set a game plan for who does this, when they do it and the expected results. Items covered in those sessions should be their sales pace in relation to their goals and their percentage of success for total seen contacts, demonstrations/presentations, write-ups, closed deals and contracts. Those items should be monitored for both yesterday’s business and month-to-date totals. Each sales person should have a day planner. The sales people should be required to have a plan for their day that is broken down into an hourly focus. To-do lists and follow-up systems should be reviewed for both sold and unsold customers. Review yesterday’s traffic for each sales person, walk back through what happened and listen for clues that would show breakdowns in their sale process. These activities alone can increase your dealership’s sales 20 percent.

To make more money, each morning the managers hold a save-a-deal meeting to review yesterday’s sold and unsold business. All deals should be reviewed. Review approved deals to see if they have been contracted and if not, why? If contracted, have they been booked out and turned to the office? Review turndowns for reasons why and any possibilities to approve those deals. Review deals not made because of product or service gaps. Review heat sheets that contain what is missing to complete deals and contracts in transit for deals that require funding but are not yet funded and deals that have missing items.

It takes increased effort and focus to improve your sales 20 percent. Many companies just increase their advertising in hopes of increasing sales, and in turn, make their sales people traffic junkies. The percentage of gain in bottom line and long-term benefits is what you are seeking, not short-term fixes. The first step is to get rid of the notion, that there are good and bad months. You either have good or bad goals, game plans, actions and reviews of actions. Good or bad months are directly attributed to those items and are not luck.

1. Educate Yourself
Don’t wait for managers or anyone else to give you the sales education you need. Unfortunately, the automobile industry has been stuck for years in a, “Throw them in and see if they can swim mentality.” Some dealerships take new recruits to a meeting room and have them watch training tapes for a day and expect them to be trained. Neither of these options will increase your odds for success.

Begin a massive self-education program that will continue your whole career. Combine visual, auditory and experiential learning. Listen to sales and motivational material every day on the way to and from work. Read, watch DVDs and then put it all together by role-playing with a manager or fellow sales person. Education Creates Motivation - Motivation Breeds Perspiration - Perspiration Creates Elevation.

2. Avoid Cancer
Attitude is everything in sales and life. All companies are full of people with negative attitudes and limiting beliefs. These beliefs and attitudes begin to perpetuate into a culture that is counterproductive to all sales people and potentially deadly to the new sales person. You can insulate yourself from the cancerous attitudes by taking the following steps. 1. Avoid smoke-and-joke circles. There has never been a positive conversation in one of these pity party circles, and there never will. Avoid them like the plaque. 2. Utilize motivational material daily. Nobody can be fully self-motivated all the time. You need tools to assist you. CDs, DVDs, pictures, music, books, quotes, spiritual material, mentors and mastermind circles are all tools that you should use.

3. Utilize a Follow-Up System Religiously
Pick a manual or software system that you will use from day one. Every customer, every prospect, every time. When you start with an organized system, you will be focused on the fundamentals that will make you successful both short- and long-term. Collect as much data as you can on each prospect and customer and organize your follow-up by using post cards, letters, gifts, newsletters, e-mail auto-responders and sequential auto-responders. Persistent = consistent.

In sales and marketing, you must always remember the order of importance of potential sales. Your current customers will always provide you the most return on investment. So often, new sales people are in a constant mad dash for new customers and forget to maximize the potential of the ones they just sold. It’s easier to maintain a good system that was created from the beginning than it is to start a new one later on.

4. Take Massive Action
It’s all about action management, not time management. You have 1,440 minutes in everyday. Success is determined by the actions you take in those minutes. Avoid the time trap of getting caught up in the stuff. Stuff are the things that are minor in nature that we spend most of our day in that create little results. Don’t major in the minor. Continually ask yourself if what you are doing will contribute to a sale either now or in the future. Keep the main thing, the main thing. Each day you must evaluate your actions and create a stop-doing list. After reviewing your day, determine what actions you should lessen or eliminate. Start your day with major actions so it sets a trend for the day. Jump in, don’t wade in.

5. Be Your Own Marketing Manager
Don’t expect any business or anyone to bring you customers. You must take the mindset from day one that you will provide 100 percent of your own customers and anything your company provides is extra. Start by creating your own brand. What will your slogan be that defines you? Utilize your picture, caricature and slogan on all marketing materials and business cards. Create your own Web site as a benefit to the customer that can be integrated with all marketing material.

Next, determine your ideal customer base that buys your product. You can purchase lists of people who drive your brand of product from one of many different list providers. Begin a multi-step marketing approach to these potential customers. Read as many books on copy writing as possible to learn the secrets of getting people to take action from your words. Educating yourself on marketing and copywriting will pay you more dividends than any other single thing you can do.

Sales people are made, not born. It’s the people who do the work, who learn to market themselves, follow-up, handle rejection, persist and maintain a winning attitude that win in the sales profession.

Have you made the commitment that automotive sales is your career choice? Unless you commit, it’s impossible that you will take the necessary steps to create the business you desire. Long-term thinking in addition to short-term goals are keys to continued success.

When you first enter into a sales position, 80 percent of your time is spent acquiring customers and 20 percent of your time is spent maintaining those customers. Eventually, with the right efforts, that model should be reversed. Eighty percent of your time should be spent maintaining your customers and 20 percent to acquire new customers.

You face a paradox of time management in building your business. The paradox is that you must work in the business and also work on the business. When you are face-to-face with customers you are working in the business but no matter how busy you are, you must find time each day to work on the business, as well. Working on the business includes marketing, prospecting, follow-up, networking, delegating, automating etc.

Insurance sales people, real estate sales people and sales people from many industries continually think and act on building their business. However, in the auto industry the majority of sales people seem addicted walk-in traffic. Eliminating this addiction is the key to long-term success.

Lead Generation = Dollar Creation. Begin to build multiple streams of leads by building a marketing web. List every way you presently acquire leads such as walk-ins, phone prospects, be-backs, referrals, repeat customers. Then begin to list new ways you could begin to acquire leads and how you can strengthen or add to your existing methods of generating leads.

Do you presently have a software program for following and managing your leads? Not the dealerships program, your program? Don’t trust anybody or anything to manage your most important resource - your customers.

Secondly, do you have a set follow up strategy? How often will you follow up? How will you follow up. What rewards will you give, and what special offers will you provide to bring them in for service? That creates the Law of Familiarity and Obligation leading to repeats and referrals.

E-mail follow-up and marketing is essential. Automate your follow-up using technology. E-mail, Autoresponder e-mail and Sequential Autoresponder e-mail are all ways to follow-up and add value that can be done while you sleep or on vacation. Video e-mail and personalization are keys to making a connection, removing the impersonal nature of e-mail and adding the wow factor.

All sales people need their own personal Web site. The site should include sign-up forms that collect e-mail addresses. The site should be personalized with your picture, family picture, your own personal story, rewards for visiting the site and helpful information for the customer. Your Web site should include an audio introduction link.

Do your business cards look like 99 percent of others sales people’s business cards? Don’t use a picture of a car, use your picture or caricature. Business cards also need the sales person’s Web site, e-mail address and slogan. Put a call to action on your cards for the customer to come see you, call you or visit your Web site.

Maximize traffic by creating a be-back CD. Create a CD that you give each customer who does not buy and invite them to play it on the way home. The CD should include information about you, your dealership and product that would benefit the customer. Include testimonials and a reward for the customer if they come see you.

Create coupon swaps with businesses around you. Visit a local restaurant and offer to build their business on their worst traffic day of the week for free. You can build their business by creating a coupon with an offer they approve and then pass these coupons out at work from the cashier, receptionist, and all departments to every customer who enters your dealership. In return ask that the restaurant pass out coupons from you approved by the dealership with a special offer to come see you.

Once you start the marketing web it will grow and take on a life of its own. Building a business first requires long-term thinking and a commitment to the industry as a career. When you commit, you have already created a business, only its shape is unfinished.

In the first football practice of each season, Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach of the Green Bay Packers would start the practice by saying “Gentleman, this is a football.” The purpose of his speech was to start each year with the basics and to begin anew with fundamental approaches to the job at hand. In business the same approach is necessary. Begin anew with the basic fundamentals everyday and one of the best business fundamentals is to remember to pick the low hanging fruit.

The low hanging fruit in business are the easiest paths to a sale. Examine your categories of customers to determine the low hanging fruit. The first category is your existing active customer. The second category is the inactive customers. Third category is the interested potential customer. Fourth category is the most likely potential customer. The fifth category is the general public.

The existing customer likes you, is currently doing business with you and is in the process of being habituated to you. Think of how you can add more value and reward this customer more. A large percentage of these customers can become hypersensitive to all offers you make them. Give them the opportunity to buy more, upgrade, and become a member or VIP.

Next, take your existing inactive customers and communicate to them and reward them. As you begin to rebuild the relationship begin to make offers for them to buy. It’s a proven fact that a large percentage of these customers will do business with you again and would love to have that opportunity if it is given to them. Most customers are simply lost because of a lack of communication and the relationship after the sale is never consummated.

Although you always have to look for new conquest customers, most businesses forget to spend the time and effort on the first two categories which are always the lowest hanging fruit. The first two categories produce the most sales, revenue and profits. More importantly, those profits are the most easily repeated. Conventional thought is that you have already sold the existing customer and now must move on to the next customer because there isn’t a profit opportunity in the one’s you have already sold. This fallacy keeps many businesses continually chasing their own tail and never having the opportunity to exponentially grow their business. At the same time, businesses that fall into this trap spend more and more money on advertising and marketing dollars to get the same or even less number of sales. I liken this process to a “dead man’s spiral” that a plane can get into before it crashes.

Start today by segmenting your customer base into the categories mentioned and create as many sub-segments as possible to start finding “riches in the niches” of your own customer base. Any business can experience resurgence and growth by going back to the fundamentals and picking the low hanging fruit.

Mark Tewart, author of How To Be A Sales Superstar

www.superstarbookvideo.com  www.marktewart.com  www.tewart.com  www.tewartvideo.com

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I want to wish everyone a happy new year. As I was out and about today I could tell it was this time of year every where I went. I went to the gym to work out and it was packed as usual for this time of year with people hell bent on starting early on their resolutions. It’s always great to see people starting to vigorously pursue what they believe they have been putting off. However, as someone who has been going to gyms and working out most of my life I know traditionally 90-95% of these people will have stopped coming to the gym by February. They say it takes twenty one days to create a habit. Unfortunately, it only takes one day to break the habit. The reality is that resolutions even with the best of intentions don’t work.

What does work is a goal created with an action plan based upon a strong sense of why. When the why gets strong, the how gets easy. All decisions are based upon the pleasure and pain principle. You are either striving for pleasure or running from pain in every thing you do. Both are excellent motivators. You must also consider wants and needs. We all need to be healthy but we don’t always want to do what is necessary to get and stay that way. Even for someone who has been practicing a mostly healthy lifestyle most of my life, I certainly have had periods of lethargy and fallen into slothful ways. I often say that people will climb mountains for want they want but won’t necessarily cross the street for what they need.

To be successful, you must have a big-ass goal. Going to the gym is not a goal. Be exact, be specific and make it big. Take one workout or one step at a time. Measure your results over a period of time. Set a routine to your actions. Always focus on the WHY. Create reminders of the pleasure and pain motivators such as the worst picture of you that you can find or also write down your goal in sentence form and carry it in your wallet and look at it everyday at the time you have set to take action. Get a coach, mentor, trainer or someone who will keep you accountable and call you on your excuses, head games and overall bullshit.

I friend of mine once said that people tend to overestimate what they can do in the short term and underestimate what they can do in the long term. Whether it’s working out or any other goal it is simply amazing what can be done in a short period of time. However, when most people start their journey, a short time can seem forever. Take one step at a time.

Remember that you are not going to be perfect. That’s exactly what I told myself while I stood in line at the liquor store with all the other New Year’s Eve imbibers. Have a happy and prosperous New Year and as I tell my son everyday when I drop him off at school. “Think big, live large and you are in charge.”

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be A Sales Superstar”

www.superstarbookvideo.com

www.marktewart.com

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I have a confession to make. I am old enough to remember rotary phones and black and white TV without cable, satellite or remote controls. I grew up in a house without central air conditioning and the first several cars I owned ran on leaded gasoline. As I look back its fun to remember those things but I certainly don’t spend any time or effort trying to relive those times with those circumstances. Times have changed and so have I. For you change, you must first let go.

Nature abhors a vacuum. As soon as space is created it is quickly refilled. The same is true in your life. For you to grow and to gain you must first be willing to create space by giving something up. In the examples of yesteryear I gave above, I gave up those things through the force of the marketplace. Don’t wait for the force of the marketplace to make your changes. Most of the time if you are forced to make changes you will be too far behind the curve.

The Law of Familiarity states that you tend to follow what you are most familiar with. Change is not your natural choice even though change is a constant force. You will make excuses for the status-quo. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the most common phrase for excuse. In today’s marketplace, it may not be broke, but it probably is obsolete and ineffective.

The first step to change is to grow your change muscle. Start educating yourself daily to developing trends. Pay attention to the emotions and wants of the masses. The great hockey player, Wayne Gretzky said “I go to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is already.” Your job is to always be watching and asking the strategic question “What’s next?”

Don’t worry about being right or wrong or you will never change. The fact is that you will be wrong more than you will be right. Being wrong will create a path to getting it right. Staying put and status quo is no longer an option. Status quo is no longer safe and has now become a death sentence. The only thing you don’t know about status quo is your exact time of death. It could be swift or it could be long and painful. The world and the marketplace are changing at a faster rate than ever before. Change and information sharing is now instantaneous.

You spend most of your day executing a model and processes you have become accustomed to. I would invite you begin spending twenty percent of your day based upon changing those things or least investigating possible changes. No matter what you do, your toughest challenge will be in just letting go. When you cling to your current status quo, it becomes a security blanket that provides you feelings of comfort and security. You must be willing to grow up every day and let go of your security blankets.

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be A Sales Superstar”

www.superstarbookvideo.com www.marktewart.com www.tewart.com