Improve Your Sales: Make Your Own Luck

Hello and welcome to this weeks edition of my sales blog. I’m discussing how we can improve your sales by making your own luck.

2016 is the year of the European Football Championships, and as a football supporter, I hope England at least attempt to perform well. For me, I’ve always been able to accept my team losing if 100% effort was made.

Making Your Own Luck

And it is the same in my working life too. Effort always creates results.

More than this, there are often unexpected benefits to putting in as much effort as possible, because when we do, we find ourselves benefiting from serendipity.

Serendipity is defined as:

“the manufacture of an occurrence or development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way”.

History is full of stories of great leaps forward being created by fortunate accidents happening to people who were already working incredibly hard. From the discovery of Viagra to the invention of Coca Cola.

For instance..

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin after years of research. However, his big breakthrough was when he accidentally left a petri dish out overnight.

Was that a fluke or did the “lucky accident” happen because Fleming had been working so hard for so long?

When describing Alexander The Great, the Roman Historian Ennius (b.239bc) wrote

“Fortune favours the bold”

…and my view is that you definitely make your own luck when it comes to sales. At Kennedy Ross, we find that when we consistently do the right things then the right results tend to happen.

I’ve found I have only ever been lucky in sales when things are already going well, never when things are running poorly.

Why is that…?

It’s because if I am already doing all the right things to get sales in the first place then it’s only a matter of time before the sales start coming in, so the outcome is more likely to be a success.

Having an effective process that you follow consistently is the key to creating your own luck.

If your plan is to contact your key accounts on a regular and structured basis and then fail to do so, don’t be surprised if you lose them to a competitor.

More importantly, if you do contact them as planned, or exceed your plans, you may find further opportunities to sell to the client arrive, seemingly out of the blue. And, at the very least, you will keep them and make them happier than your competition.

Sales is about having a process, sticking to it, measuring it, reviewing it and repeating it, again and again. Toyota summarise this best, they have a phrase, which is now internationally recognised:

‘Plan-Do-Check-Act’.

Let’s face it, that process can apply to the England football team as much as your business. And, the more chances you create, the more likely you will score (forgive the metaphor but it is the European Championships).

This is serendipity.

Improve Your Sales

So improve your sales by putting in 100% effort into them and you will make your own luck. You never know, you may qualify for the knockout stages, or even win the cup. Now I’m getting over excited.

If you need extra help putting together a sales plan or boosting your motivation, Kennedy Ross offer excellent sales training led by industry professionals. Get in touch today!