Lots of technologies can help you produce better sales results.
What if I could offer you a technology that would double your sales results? What if this technology could, if used, double your personal productivity? What if this technology could double—or triple—your personal effectiveness? What if it could increase your personal and sales effectiveness—literally—by an order of magnitude?
Would you buy it? Would you use it?
This technology isn’t new. No one even knows who invented it. It is easily and readily available almost anywhere and for almost no money. It isn’t Sales 2.0. It isn’t even Sales 1.0.
This technology has always been the critical component of Success 1.0.
This technology is an alarm clock.
The alarm clock is a terrific metaphor for the master key to success in any endeavor, self-discipline (the master key to sales effectiveness). The alarm clock is metaphor for using wisely the time you have. The metaphor works because the clock sounds an alarm that it is time to take action.
But I don’t mean this post as a metaphor for using your time to take action. It is instead a call to take the concrete action of rising earlier and using your time to work on massively improving your knowledge, your abilities, and your effectiveness.
If there is one single action you can take to develop your self-discipline, it is the simple act of setting your alarm clock to rise a single hour earlier each day. This is the discipline that enables you to build more and greater disciplines.
Setting the alarm clock and rising an hour earlier gives you the time to read and to study your profession and your industry. It means you have an extra hour a day to study your client’s and dream client’s industry or business. In an hour a day, you can develop the business acumen you need to dramatically improve your results.
Rising earlier can give you the time to plan your sales calls and your communications with your clients. It can give you the time you need to write the list of high impact questions that will differentiate and define you as a sales professional. You can use an hour a day to write the scripts that will make your communications with your clients more effective and more valuable.
In an extra hour a day you can brainstorm the ways in which you might be able to create new value for your clients and dream clients. In an hour a day you can discover, define and create the ideas that will fuel your ability to create value for your clients and dream clients. You can develop the ideas and tools you need to nurture these relationships.
You can spend a single hour building a list of dream clients, clients to whom you who can create and deliver the most valuable solutions. You can complete the research necessary to ensure the greatest use of your limited time prospecting and your prospect’s limited attention.
Using the alarm clock to rise a single hour earlier give you 7 extra hours to dedicate to self-improvement week—hours that greatly amplify your sales results. These are hours that you are working and when it is likely that your competitors are still fast asleep. These hours compound over time, building incremental improvements in your knowledge, your abilities, and your sales effectiveness. Weeks turn to months of 28 hours of self-improvement, to quarters of 91 hours dedicated to self-improvement, to years where you have spent 365 hours improving the single asset that has the greatest ability to determine your results: You!
If you haven’t already, wind the clock and set the alarm . . . for an hour earlier.
There is nothing that has the potential to help you generate greater sales results than developing your personal effectiveness. There is no technology that better enables you to produce greater results than the alarm clock–as long as you combine it with the commitment to rise earlier and to take action improving yourself and your results!
1. What will you do with an extra hour each day?
2. What are you passionate about enough to set the alarm clock for an hour earlier each day?
3. What is it costing you to hit the snooze button each day? Are you really turning off the sound, or are you shutting off the commitments that you have made to yourself?
4. What kind of competitive advantage could you gain by developing your personal effectiveness?