Sara Hand

It’s hot. It’s rainy. The kids are getting restless as the time to go back to school approaches and so are the parents. Business owners have been playing phone tag around summer vacations, and long weekends. In Florida, on August 23rd that will all change and everything will begin to get back to normal. At least that is what many people will tell themselves. Once we get back from vacation, once the kids get back in school, once Labor Day weekend is over…

Not everyone can ride a wave...

If your business only runs well during normal, you are looking at a brief 7-8 weeks before Halloween gets here and then Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving everyone will be waiting to make decisions at the start of the New Year. In the beginning of the year it will take a couple weeks for everyone to get back in the swing of things after a long break. Then again, there will be a brief 7-8 weeks before Spring Break and Easter Holidays disrupt normal business.  Somewhere after Spring Break we have another 7 weeks or so before graduations, weddings and summer vacations kick in again.

21 weeks of normal sounds ridiculous! Yet we didn’t count tradeshows, CEU’s, national holidays or all the other things that business works around. We didn’t even consider the fact that many businesses don’t even get ready for those 21 weeks during their “off times”, but wait until everything is back to normal to get ready to do business as normal.

“So what do I do about this,” you wonder?

“I have enough challenges from recent economic turbulence to only have 105-120 normal working days.”

 Moving past normal takes an understanding of seasons. A season in business is much like surfing. If you wait until the wave is here to get ready to ride…You are too late! In between waves, when things are little slower is when you paddle out to be ready. Days when there are NO waves are days for servicing your board, or possibly cross-training to master other skills that might be beneficial to your success.

Consider moving past normal and getting ready to catch the wave!

Although it is still HOT, and it is still Rainy and not everyone is in their office everyday; consider being strangely different. Consider moving past normal and getting ready to catch the wave!

Check out growing your Business!

As a sales professional we do things that are at the top of the list of “scary” for the average person. We talk to strangers on a daily basis, calling people we don’t know on the telephone or even walking in places we have never been before to talk to people we have never met.  We ask others to make decisions. Not only do we ask them to make decisions, but to do so about money. We talk about money. We ask how they would like to pay for their purchase. Sometimes we even give them the chance to back out, knowing if they don’t back out now the chances of them doing it later are less…Or at least these are the things we train to do. We buy books and watch videos and go to conferences and seminars and workshops all in the attempts to improve our performance and our bottom line. Yet after all this training, we still often walk out kicking ourselves for not doing what we have studied so hard to do. Why…when we actually get to the moment we have prepared for…why do we back down or forget?

Actually there are a number of reasons, but at the heart is fear.  Fear that someone may not like us, fear that they may not see us as competent or proficient, fear that because of our inadequacies they won’t buy. Yet so interesting is the fact that because we are afraid we don’t do the things that are necessary to make the sale and so as the old saying goes… “What we fear has come upon us.”