You don’t have to struggle to make sales! When you first started your business, you imagined spending your days helping clients with your hard-earned expertise. You wanted to do what you love while earning more money and working fewer hours. Perhaps your dreams were dashed when you realized that new clients are hard to find. Can we have some real talk? Selling sucks. You had hopes that the clients you do have would love your work and refer more business then you can handle, but that hasn’t happened. Prospecting makes you cringe. Sales calls make you sweaty. You’ve left an office having done nothing more than leave a marketing brochure that no one will ever read.

I know the feeling. When I started in sales, I was bad. By bad, I mean truly awful. On the phone, I was nervous, and I am sure that I sounded like Porky Pig strung out on Red Bull. I remember going to get a coffee in the breakroom room after a tortuous morning of making prospecting calls and hearing the sales manager and two top salespeople laughing about how bad I was. They were taking bets on if I would even finish my first week. I felt humiliated. I wanted to quit. But I also didn’t want to prove them right. I made the decision that I was going to learn to sell. I humbled up and went to the two top salespeople and asked for help. Both went out of their way during the next two months to spend the time to answer my questions. I spent $300 that first month buying all the featured sales books at the bookstore. (This was B.A. – before Amazon.) I devoured any information I could find, and over time I started to understand that selling was like anything else; it was not magic. It had an underlying process with a series of steps that, if followed, would result in success. At the end of my first year, I ended up as the number one salesperson in the company. Not bad for someone who wasn’t expected to finish the first week.

A lot of companies give their employees product training but do not define skills or processes to help them be successful. I got the opportunity with a technology company to start a brand-new sales team that sold training and services. This opportunity allowed me to see if I could design a smarter way to develop new salespeople. I decided to look for smart people who were open to learning and willing to follow processes. I was willing to overlook the fact that they might not have traditional sales experience. We hired ten people, of which three had a traditional sales background. Our sales goal was five million dollars that first year. We finished the year with sales of close to fifteen million dollars. Our top three salespeople had no traditional sales experience, and we quickly realized that we were on to something. I started four sales divisions for that company, all selling professional services with great sales success.

In my business travels, I often connected with brilliant consultants who had tried starting their dream business only to fail because they couldn’t generate enough sales and had to return to corporate life. To me this is heartbreaking. Passionate people with the power to change lives don’t have to struggle to make sales. YOU don’t have to struggle to make sales. I started Lonestar Sales Performance to help good people acquire the skills, strategies, techniques, and tools to help them develop the business they have always wanted.