The Marketing Bureau

6 Tips for Reaching Your Potential

We all have a tendency to fall back on old habits. Old habits feel safe and comfortable and familiar – a haven in a stormy economy and an uncertain job situation. “Salespeople look at what’s going on out there and don’t want to push the envelope too much,” observes Roz Usheroff, principal at The Usheroff Institute, an organization that helps frontline staff define a winning brand. “They don’t want to appear too radical. They think, ‘I want to keep my job, so I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.’” There’s just one problem with this approach: It doesn’t push you forward.

First Published on www.sellingpower.com

In fact, if there were ever a time to be a courageous and creative risk-taker, this is it, says Usheroff. Smart, creative risk-taking puts you in the limelight, makes you a contributor, and allows you to take control of today’s dicey sales environment. But the key word here is “smart.” Being a risk-taker doesn’t mean being reckless. To boost the likelihood that your gambles will pay off, follow Usheroff’s six tips for intelligent risk-taking:

Trust your instincts. Don’t wait for complete certainty to make a decision. Complete certainty, if it comes at all, will come too late. Instead, trust your instincts. That’s what one executive did when his product-development team insisted that a new product wasn’t good enough. The executive’s gut told him the timing was right, and the market ended up responding enthusiastically. “If you have a good idea, don’t incubate it,” says Usheroff.

Ask for help. If your ideas require skills or knowledge outside your area of expertise, seek help. Often we fear that asking for help will diminish us in the eyes of our colleagues and clients, but that attitude sets us up for failure.

“Salespeople in particular think they need to know what they’re doing,” Usheroff observes. “Seasoned reps are the most guilty. They think since they’ve been in sales for so long, they should know everything.”

If this sounds familiar, remember the Marine Corps general who once defined leadership as courage, including the courage to ask for help when facing a problem.

Unleash positive energy. Fear, stress, and uncertainty can be your friends in tough times, but only if you learn to use them as motivators, rather than allow them to drain your energy, says Usheroff. “Remind yourself that progress won’t happen without taking a step forward into the unknown.”

Usheroff would know. After her two biggest clients canceled their entire 2009 training programs, she took her own advice and radiated energy in new directions, going after smaller companies, writing a book, publishing e-newsletters, and exploring Internet marketing. The result: By the end of 2009, her business was soaring again.

“Just because you’re experiencing fear doesn’t mean you have to project it,” says Usheroff.

Anticipate and act. Hockey great Wayne Gretzsky once said he never follows the puck. Instead, he skates to where the puck is going to be. Usheroff says sales reps must do the same by taking a hard look at customers and figuring out what their needs are going to be – then positioning themselves there. If you’re constantly responding to events rather than anticipating them, you’re going to be too late.

Learn from failure. When a Chrysler employee made an error that cost the company $1 million, he tried to resign. Lee Iacocca wouldn’t accept the resignation, saying, “You can’t resign! I just spent a million dollars training you.” In short, Iacocca understood that failure offers the best opportunity for learning.

“If you never fail, you fail to learn,” says Usheroff. So when a risk doesn’t pay off, don’t crumble. Instead, analyze what went wrong and learn from it. And remember that the biggest failures often lead to the biggest successes.

Be realistic. While risk-taking is good, recklessness is not. Before you dive after a new idea, check it for reasonableness. “Run ideas by people who you know have your best interests in mind,” says Usheroff. While you can’t wait for certainty, it’s still important to do enough homework that you’re confident your idea will have a better chance of winning than failing.

A reliance on the same old ways of doing things might feel comfortable, but it’s a sure path toward stagnation. As Usheroff points out on her Website (www.usheroff.com), “Whatever happens in your life or career, it’s the inactivity that truly suffocates the spirit. Take the risk, whether you succeed or not. You’ll be wiser and richer in experience.”