How to Stay Motivated
By Kerry L. Johnson, Ph.D.

It's 8am on Monday morning. You had a great weekend and wish it didn't have to end. Last week was finished with a bang but today you just don't feel the same motivation to win. As a result you walk in the office and immediately read your mail. Then you talk to another salesperson for an hour while sipping coffee. It's almost time for lunch. You avoid prospecting for customers due to the lack of time available before you eat. You're back at 1:30pm and realize you have a couple of letters to write. It's time to go home. You just wasted a day. At $150 an hour worth of lost sales production, your lack of motivation cost you $1200. What happened? You can't afford any more days like this one. But how do you stay motivated all the time. Is it possible?

Motivation is functionally defined as possessing the self-discipline to do what you need to do when you need to do it. Of course everyone is motivated. A golfer is motivated to practice his golf swing. A mother is motivated to care for her children. A child is motivated to eat candy anytime it's available. The trick is to motivate yourself to do the things you know you should be doing even when you don't feel like doing it. But you'd work 20 hrs. a day if you were starving. Right now you just aren't hungry enough. Experiencing a lack of motivation frustrates us all. But here are a couple of tips that will help you stay motivated to do the things you need to do. Successful people do the things less successful people refuse to do.

4 WAYS TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF

1) Make time psychology work for you. If you have ever taken a time management course before, you have learned how to pack more into less. But have you ever noticed how difficult it is to leave a project or job incomplete? You can play on this psychology of completion by writing out a things to do list before you go home at the end of the work day. Chances are if you don't know exactly where to pick up where you left off, you'll have to start over. Tonight, before you leave the office lay out 5 calls you need to make tomorrow morning. Or go home right in the middle of filling out a prospect contact sheet.

2) Give yourself daily and hourly goals. Very few of us have the ability to stay disciplined all the time. Yet studies have shown that a big difference between those who succeed and those who fail is constant and concentrated activity. Big hitters report such behaviors as not taking lunch until they make a preset number of phone calls. They don't allow themselves to play golf until they sell a certain number of units. Sure they make sacrifices. But in the meantime they also make sales. Most who practice this method of self denial say that when they do earn a lunch or a golf game, the taste is very sweet when linked to successfully accomplished activity.

3) Make selling a game. When you take your sales career too seriously, it becomes drudgery instead of enjoyment. Most top producers mention that their income takes a back seat to how much fun they have on the job. Interestingly, many poor producers look at their paycheck as being the biggest motivator. The problem is that your sales production will fluctuate. You may go from who's who to who's he in the space of a year. For example, play golf more often with your best customers. Send out birthday cards to prospects or customers you care about. See how many phone calls you can make in hour or a day without caring particularly about the result.

4) Burn out is a key factor in maintaining motivation. A great way to avoid the symptoms of burnout is to link rewards to activity instead of success. One way to kill motivation is to increase your frustration and isolation. You have probably at one time already done this by withdrawing from the people in your life you love. But a great way to create motivation is to give yourself a reinforcement gift that comes as a result of superior effort. Effort always results in success if it is maintained.

A manager once asked me to speak at his conference after dinner on the last night. As the president was speaking, the manager told me that he was cutting the salespersons' commissions, increasing their quotas, taking out all perks and financial overrides. He then looked at me and said, "We'd like you to go out there now and give them a big motivational sendoff." Motivation doesn't come from a rousing speech or a drug that works for an 8 hour period. It is a by product of your desire to be successful.

FEAR OF SALES SLUMP

No other recession has done as much damage to your sales as this one. But the power a recession possesses lies in the perception of the producer. Here's a question. Is your sales volume down this year over last? If yes, is your activity down as well? If you said no, you're among the lucky few. The truth is, someone's doing business out there and I want it to be me. The casualty of this recession is activity. Most salespeople buy into the perception that it really tough out there and everybody is cash poor. So why not wait it out until the recession is over. This philosophy is flawed. Many businesses make more money during a recession than any another time. The home improvement do-it-yourself industry is a good example.

Self-doubt at times results from the discomfort that there is a no win situation. I've often wondered why prospects refuse to accept phone calls from salespeople who are trying to follow up. It becomes very apparent to even the most green salesperson that the prospects who do not want to do business with you are the ones least likely to return phone calls. The general feeling is that "if I can't say yes, then I'll try to avoid communicating at all. I don't want listen to the salesperson try to overcome my objections". This seeming Catch-22 dilemma exists because your prospect is procrastinating making the call due to a perception of discomfort.

I recently spoke to a conference of salespeople who's company has received a lot of bad press over the last year. The president lamented that the Wall Street Journal had come down particularly hard on them but they would weather the storm. What he was most worried most about were the newer salespeople. They seemed to buy into the poor press and slowed down their prospecting waiting for better times. The truth is apparent. It is tougher now than a year ago. But are you making it worse on yourself ? If you have risen to the occasion and increased your activity in proportion, congratulations. You are in the minority. IF YOUR ACTIVITY HAS NOT INCREASED BY AT LEAST AS MUCH AS YOUR SALES HAVE DECREASED, YOUR RECESSION WILL LAST LONGER THAN YOUR COMPETITORS.

All of this relates back to motivation. Complacency is the killer. Discouragement is the distraction. It becomes all too obvious during the down times. The answer lies in sticking even closer to your sales game plan than usual. The more sophisticated your business, the greater the need to stick to a daily activity plan. The greater you need also to give yourself daily incentives to maintain that momentum.

Success is never forever and failure is never fatal. Make this tough period a time that produces renewed motivation in you to thrive rather than an excuse not to act. Someone's getting business, why shouldn't it be you?

DR. KERRY L. JOHNSON is a Tustin, CA-based professional speaker and author of Mastering The Game: The Human Edge in Sales and Marketing. You can order it by calling 800/883-8787.

Copyright © 1997 International Productivity Systems, Inc.