Did you evolve your thinking in 2015?
Personal professional development is key to your sustained competitiveness. This is true for me, for you, and for anybody else in any profession. It’s predicted that by the year 2020 one million sales job will have evaporated. How do youmaintain your value? Also in sales we must take care to allocate time to our continued development. Our capacity for helping clients make decisions that are right for them needs to develop along with evolution in how decisions are made and buying is done.
At YourSales we’ve been chipping away at the YourSales Academy for what feels like a long time. An excellent talent management team is at the core of what we’re trying to achieve: Free Personal Professional Development opportunity for all the independent sales consultants who are signed up with YourSales. When we talk about personal development, we’re not primarily talking about sales training. Development is not about learning new methods or new tools. If you want to perform above and beyond this year’s numbers in 2016, you need to not only get better at what you currently do. You need to become able to solve problems in new ways altogether.
Personal professional development is about changing the way you think to solve problems. It’s about taking entirely new directions.
Personal professional development is about changing the way you think to solve problems. It’s about taking entirely new directions. In personal professional development you work on your personality. You change how you think about solutions to problems!
Disregard for a moment all you’ve learned over the past year, which related to tools, sales methodology, objection handling, time management, and other skills, specific to your trade.
Have you done any work to develop your thinking? Have your principals or your employers done anything to assist? If not you’re missing out. You’re standing still.
Here are three steps, which are easy to take if you want to start working on your personality traits, rather than simply make minor adjustments to your skills:
Get a personality assessment – a good one.
Make sure it’s an assessment which you can’t get the result you want. It certainly shouldn’t be one of those assessments that give you a score for your sales skills. Remember, we’re trying to get to the bottom of how you currently solve problems. We want to draw a line from your current capacity, to the problem-solving capacity you would like to aim for.
Get feedback on your assessment.
Preferrably by someone who has no stake in how you perform on a daily basis. You want as open and honest feedback as possible. You don’t want neither the giver of the feedback nor your own reception of the feedback to be clouded by whatever is going on in the environment around both of you. It should not be distorted by a desire to reach a certain number, a Key Performance Indicator, or tick a box in a spreadsheet.
Get to work!
Whether you get help shooting for the stars or not, always remember that it’s your development. You need to grab the responsibility to shape your future – or someone else will.
We’re talking about how you remain valuable and relevant long term – your life depends on it.
This is important stuff. We’re not talking about how you meet next quarter’s target. We’re talking about how you remain valuable and relevant long term – your life depends on it.
Like I mentioned elsewhere, we’re working on an Academy. We’ve been at it for a good portion of the past two years and still have some way to go. This fall we implemented the bullets mentioned above. All of the independent sales professionals registered with us have access to it.
We’re happy to share how we’ve specifically done things so far. Feel free to reach out to us here in comments or one of the ways mentioned at //yoursales.com.
If you’re an independent Sales Professional, and this approach sounds like something for you, sign up with YourSales for free at: //signup.yoursales.com.