The Bicycle of Success

“How could I succeed in selling?” Haven’t you ever asked yourself like this, particularly in the early stage of your sales career? 

To answer this question I’d like you to imagine that you’re riding a bike. Bicycle is a vehicle that brings you to the land of success.   Individuals may define success differently.  Some say that money is a representation of success. Some say that is to customer satisfaction. Some say that to achieve sales targets regularly, and so on.

But in the midst of differences there is still a common factor that money or prizes are incentives for the sellers. For those who are not motivated by money or prizes, they are not fit to the sales career.  Salespeople are paid by incentive or commission more than their basic salary. The more they sell, the more they earn. Therefore, it is inevitably that money is an effective tool in motivating sales forces.

Let’s back to the vehicle of success – a bike. A bicycle of success has three major parts: front wheel, rear wheel, and chain.

Front wheel means ‘knowledge.’ Salespeople must know how their product and service could do for the customers. How good they are in their product and service, they should be good at the competitions’ as well. In addition to product knowledge, the relevant customer’s information as well as rules and regulation in the market place are also the important knowledge. However, having knowledge is just potential power. The real power comes from the applied knowledge. A pharmaceutical sales representative, for example, must match the characteristic of his/her product and service that could solve the physician’s problem in order to fulfill the unmet medical needs of his/her customer.     

The second part of the bike is ‘rear wheel.’ The rear wheel is a metaphor of ‘skills.’ Skills that help salespeople communicate value of their product or service to customers. For the sophisticated customers, telling is not effective as asking. They won’t listen to you. Instead of telling your customers of how your product can solve their problems, help them to uncover those problems and how severe and urgency they are if those are not solved right now. You can do it with good questioning.

‘Chain’ is the third part of this bike. It is working ‘attitude.’ It must be lubricated, clean with no rust. Good working attitude drives you to move forward. Whenever you’re down, it pulls you up.  When you’re on the right track, it accelerates your speed. One attitude that I’d like to mention here is perseverance. Selling is more on failure, less on success.  Think about the last time you had visited your customers, how many success calls compared to the failure ones. The number of customers who said ‘no’ or delay their decisions were much more than ones who said ‘yes’ or welcome to your offers. The successful salespeople have never give-up attitude. To achieve their goals, they analyze what’s wrong, use the failure as lesson learn, and correct it.  It's impossible to experience success without experiencing failure. It's how we handle failures that strengthen us.

You’re now on a bike. Make sure that it composes the three major parts in good condition. If so, you’re on the way to the land of success.  Bon voyage!