You Alone Are Responsible for Your Success

Posted: August 28, 2013

Set a goal to be the master of your own destiny. All sorts of obstacles can stand in the way and work against your ability to succeed. The key is powering through and not allowing them to control your level of success.

Michelle Davidson, of RainToday, shows how to change your mindset to make sure you succeed.

Plenty of outside forces affect our lives—both professionally and personally. In fact, some days it may seem like the whole world is against you. Traffic makes you late for a meeting. Your computer dies while you're in the middle of writing a proposal. Your conference call with an important prospect drops half way through the conversation.

You could let those things get you down. You could throw your hands in the air and say, "That's it! This was not meant to be." You could blame those events for a bad sales year.

The reality is, however, you and your mindset are responsible for your success. You can think negatively about what happens to you, or you can shine a positive light on things, learn from the experience, and move on. You can wait for sales to walk in, or you can network and market your services to make people aware of you. You can wait for that prospect to return your call, or you can pick up the phone and try calling again.

You are in the driver's seat. If you don't have as many clients as you'd like, you have the power to change that. Here are a few things you can do:

1. Sell with a Noble Purpose

When you sell with purpose—truly want to make a difference in clients' lives, not just want to make money—you will sell more, says Lisa McLeod, author of Selling with Noble Purpose.

"I used to be at Proctor and Gamble, and my former colleague there … who was the CMO did a 10-year study of global brands. And the organizations whose stated intention was to improve their customers' lives and who carried that all the way through their business outperformed the S&P [500 companies] by almost 400%," she says in her podcast interview Having a Noble Sales Purpose Puts You on the Fast Track to More Revenue.

In a study McLeod helped conduct, she discovered the same thing. Salespeople who were driven by a higher purpose sold more. One woman was a representative for a pharmaceutical company who sold to doctors and medical organizations. The saleswoman said the thing she thinks about every time she talks with a buyer is how the drug she sold helped an elderly woman get her life back. She thinks about how her product helps patients, not about how much money she'll get from the sale.

Read the entire article You Alone Are Responsible for Your Success, at RainMakerBlog.