I am a firm
believer that people remember only stories and not management jargons when it
comes to real life. During one of my recent interactions with a couple of brand & social influencers, I realized
that how important Story-telling is for upcoming entrepreneurs or budding professionals.
So keeping
this narrative in the background let me
try to share few tips on how to be a great salesman. (As most of us would be doing our sales budgeting or forecasting for 2018).
Story:
Our parents play an important role in carving out our personality, our character, our
ethos by guiding us throughout our
childhood.
In our story
there exists one such family comprising of our main protagonist (son) and His
father. Our main protagonist /hero lived with his family among his other 5
siblings. His father worked as Electric plant
supervisor, and his mother worked at a bank. His father taught him to work hard
and not to be tempted by street life.
Like any other kids of his age, our
main protagonist (son) also used to ask his father to buy him new toys, gifts
etc; And on one such occasion his father called him and asked his son to sell
his old T-shirt which he had worn only once.
Father: How much do you think this T-shirt would cost now?
Son: $1/-
Father: Good, you must go and sell it for $2.
Here comes the first tip:
a) Conceive & believe that you can
do whatever tasks come your way.
Son: Ok father. I
shall do it.
The little boy then took his sparingly used t-shirt and washed it with fragrant
softeners, steam ironed it (made it look like new) and took it to neighborhood community market and started showing
to his friends & local market customers and finally managed to sell it for
$2 after 6 hours of hard work.
Son: Father, here
you go. And he hands over $2 to his
father.
Father goes to the cupboard
and brings out brand new white shirt.
Father: Good Son,
now you take this new white shirt and sell it for $200/-.
Son readily accepts the task & nods in confirmation
Son kept wondering as to why his father is doing this to
him, which idiot would pay $200 for a $10 shirt, he kept exploring various
possibilities, meeting local merchants but never gave up. He stumbled upon a
friend who was going for a soccer match
and mentioned that their favorite soccer team is playing county match.
As they say, luck favors those who strive for success
with their hard work, the hero of my
story (little boy) gets an idea and he requests his friend to take him along
with him.
On reaching football ground, little boy somehow managed
to get close to football players who were very popular. He requested those
football players to autograph on his shirt.
He then took this shirt to a community market and puts
the shirt on auction and to his surprise, the crowd
got really interested in owning autographed shirt & that shirt was bought
within 30 mins from the time it was put on auction and guess the price ….. It got whopping $2000/-.
Son (goes to his father): father take $2000/- I have accomplished the task.
Father (with tears in his eyes): Congrats son, my prayers
are with you, you shall be a successful man in life one day.
Learnings from this story:
a)
Conceive: Never refuse or reject any task or
project. Conceive it as done. Have faith in yourself and if required, learn or
acquire skills to do that task or collaborate to build teams in case of startups ventures.
So whatever the targets/budgets are assigned to you by
your company, never look at the big figure rather try to conceive ways as to
HOW it can be achieved rather than stating, it’s not possible.
Focus on HOW it can be
achieved and not on WHY it cannot be done.
b)
Believe in Yourself: If there is anyone who could do
that task, is YOU only.
c)
Action: Never ever Give up & Try hard
every time you hit a roadblock.
Life from time to time throws challenges at us and we
should face it head-on rather than giving in to those challenges.
Remember “For those
who dare to dream, there is the whole new world
to win”.
Hope my attempt at
developing a correct sales attitude with storytelling
narration would help my readers & followers in setting their targets for
2018 & same principle could also be implemented in setting our Life goals.
I wish all my readers a very happy & prosperous New
Year 2018.
And do you know who this little boy was when he grew up…? He grew to become legendary Michael Jordan-
the best basketball player world has ever seen.
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