Have you ever felt like you're being left behind because you're unwilling to try or learn new things? Or perhaps you had a great month in sales and you've met your quota, so you take a salesperson's vacation and just sort of coast for the next three days until the end of the month. Are you comfortable where you are and therefore don't challenge yourself to do better?
The problem with any of these attitudes is that there's no status quo in sales. Things are constantly changing. And if you want to grow, you're going to have to take some risks. That's Sandler Rule #48: A Life Without Risk is a Life Without Growth.
Here's an important thing for salespeople to remember—your top customers are on your competitor's prospect list. It's true. And it doesn't matter what industry you're in. Companies lose top customers all the time because they get complacent.
So how do you get past complacency? How do you overcome the habit of coasting on past achievements? It's a bad position for any salesperson to be in, so it's a good idea to get past it.
First, resolve to learn whatever you can from whatever experiences you have. Think about past achievements failures, and evaluate your lessons learned. And then as you encounter each new experience, capture your lessons learned and apply those for future growth.
Next, be willing to reach for something you're not sure of or something that might be better than what you have now. Remember, a life without risk is a life without growth. Challenge yourself to call some gatekeepers or ask for a meeting with that top executive at a prospect company to break yourself out of a cycle of complacency.
Taking risks is probably going to make you uncomfortable because it often leads to change. There's a difference between risk and change, but both can make us uncomfortable. We can calculate risk and do things in small chunks, but that doesn't mean we'll be comfortable with the change that comes from it, at least not at first. But that's how we grow.
I talk to business leaders and salespeople all the time who have fallen into the trap of comfort and complacency. They didn't have that bad of a year. They didn't lose that much money. They lost a few customers here and there, but it's not a big deal. Except for the fact that a few years down the road, that adds up to hundreds of customers that they can't replace as quickly as they lost them.
What's something you can do today to apply this rule? What risk can you take to help yourself grow? What risk can you encourage your team to take in order to grow? How will you avoid settling for comfort and complacency today and in the future?
People get comfortable where they are, and no one really wants to be uncomfortable, right? But sometimes we have to be uncomfortable to grow.
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