InsuranceNewsNet Magazine January 2011 : Page 11
THE LAW OF SALES SUCCESS WITH BRIAN TRACY | FEATURE FELDMAN: Without a doubt, time man-agement separates the winners from los-ers. We all have the same amount of time given to us, yet there are some people who just seem to get more done, who make more calls and close more busi-ness. Even the busiest and most suc-cessful salespeople in the business are always in search of better ways to effec-tively manage their time. What are some of your key strategies for effective time management? TRACY: The first thing to understand is that, if you do not deliberately man-age your time, your time will get out of control. The default setting on the human being, especially in sales, is underachievement and failure. There-fore, if you want to break that, you’ve really got to become very good at time management. When I first started studying time management, I was astonished. I thought it was sort of like a peripheral thing that you did in the course of your lifetime. What I found later was that it’s the most important thing you do in life. Your time management largely determines your success. So I just began to study it. And as you begin to study it—surprise, sur-prise—you get better at it. If you look at the people in the top 20 percent, there are no exceptions. They all use their time better. And what I say is that when we start off in life, we start off with lots of time and no money. And over the course of your working lifetime, if you use your time well, you end up with a lot of money and less time. The worst of all is to use up all your time and end up broke after 20 or 30 years of working, which unfortunately is too common. There are three critical things in time management. Number one, plan your time in advance. And the way you do that, based on enormous research, is you make a list of everything you have to do at the beginning of each day— preferably the night before so that your mind can work on it overnight. Num-ber two, you set priorities on your list and you pick the most important things that you have to do. If you could only do one thing the following day, what would it be? And then number three is, in the morning, you start on your most impor-tant task and you stay with it until it’s done. If you do that, you’re going to have a fabulous life. You’re going to accom-plish two, three, five, even 10 times as much as other people. You’re going to be wealthy and successful. You’re going to have a tremendous sense of personal accomplishment. You’ll have high self-esteem and self-confidence. You’re going to be respected by everybody around you. And if you don’t, you’re not. It’s black and white. One of the great things I’ve found is that nature is neutral. Nature doesn’t care where you’re coming from and what you started with. Your education or background or family, or anything else, doesn’t matter. If you do what other successful people do, you get the same results. And if you don’t, you don’t. Nature is neutral. FELDMAN: That’s profound. TRACY: Yeah, it’s so important to under-stand that. Some of the most successful people in financial services of all kinds are people who started with absolutely nothing and struggled for a long time before they became successful. FELDMAN: Can you explain your Law of Sales? TRACY: The first law is that nothing hap-pens in sales until the sale takes place. We’re really coming back to time man-agement. The key to time management— an expert told me this and I never forgot it—is managing the sequence of events. In other words, managing what you do first, what you do second and what you do not do at all. Time management means that you have so many things to do and you choose the order. And, in the choice of the order, you determine your entire life. So when we say nothing hap-pens until the sale takes place, then what salespeople need to do is spend 80 per-cent of their time selling. Now there’s a law of three that I keep. And it seems to be true for every single Tracy has authored many New York Times bestsellers on everything from time management to proven, superior selling strategies. occupation. The law of three says that there are three things that you do in the course of a day, whatever your job is, that account for 90 percent of your income. If you’re in management, there are three. If you’re a cardio physician, there are three. If you’re a mechanic, there are three. If you’re a business owner, there are three. It varies depending upon your occupa-tion, but there are only three. The way that you determine what your three are—and I’ve done this with thousands of people in my seminars—is making a list of everything you do in the course of the day. And then ask your-self if you could only do one thing on this list, all day long, which one activ-ity would contribute the most to your income? And that will pop out at you. And then you ask the question again. If you could only do two things all day long, which would be number two? And then if you could only do three things all day long, which would be number three? I have done this for now for years—10, 12 years. It works 100 percent of the time. Then I say there is always one key task and two support tasks. And in selling, January 2011 InsuranceNewsNet Magazine 11
Publication List
