HOW TO GET EVERYTHING YOU WANT IN LIFE

By BILL LEE

As just about everyone intellectually understands, there's a huge difference between wants and needs. In the USA and Canada, the great majority of us have everything we need: food, water, shelter, clothing, etc. Evidence of this fact is that obesity is one of North America's greatest health problems, while malnutrition is practically non-existent.

But the title of this article is "How to Get Everything You WANT in Life."

I believe I first heard this statement from Zig Ziglar: You can get everything in life that you want if you'll just help enough other people get what they want. This is one of the truest statements you'll ever hear. It pertains not just to customers, but also to your family of support personnel.

If you are a salesperson, you are highly dependent on a lot of other people in your company. You cannot be successful at sales unless your company has a conscientious group of operations people, administrative people and management personnel.

I can't imagine a halfway intelligent salesperson not understanding that he or she really needs every other person on their business team. But few days go by when I'm on a consulting assignment that salespeople don't tell me how stupid and undependable the men and women are who work in support roles and how insensitive most of them are to the customer's (and, of course, the salesperson's) interests.

Salespeople are naïve if they don't understand how they are quite often perceived by other members of the business team, especially by operations personnel. While many salespeople take personal credit for creating opportunities for operations people to have a job, operations people more often than not see salespeople as arrogant, selfish and self-centered.

The truth of the matter is that both salespeople and operations personnel are critical to the success of any business. No salesperson could earn a living wage if he or she were required to personally deliver everything that he or she were able to sell. It would be equally time consuming to try to sell in between unloading and putting into stock incoming deliveries from vendors.

Relationships

It's a lot easier to get someone to do a favor for you if you have already made a significant investment in building a relationship with that person. This is especially true of drivers, dispatchers and yard foremen. Wise salespeople treat coworkers a lot like they treat customers.

Internal Customers

The reason this is true is because each person on your business team is an internal customer. You are their internal customer. If you want your internal customers to give you preferential treatment, you have to give your internal customers preferential treatment.

Pizza and Cokes

While on a consulting assignment in Connecticut, I spent some time with an outside salesperson as he called on his customers. As we drove from job to job, he was forever honking his horn and throwing up his hand to say hello to the driver when he would see one of his company trucks approaching. On one occasion, he saw a driver making a delivery and stopped by the job site to say hello.

"You sure do go out of your way to be nice to the drivers," I commented.

"Yeah, these guys can make me look awfully good or awfully bad. My job would be a lot more difficult without them on my team. In fact, just last week, I told the drivers not to bring a lunch to work. I told them that I was buying pizza for the whole crowd."

"That must have cost you a lot of money," I said.

"No, it didn't cost me anything. The money I spent on those guys was an investment, and I promise you, I'll get a good return on that investment."

If you want to be in a position to ask a favour of someone on the operations team and hear a cheerful "yes," consider the following ideas:

1. Send a lot of thank you notes. Each time someone does you a favour, send them a thank you note.
2. Occasionally ask this question: "What can I do differently to make your job easier?"
3. Tell members of the operations team how much you appreciate them.
4. Introduce operations and support staff to clients. Make people feel like they are important members of your team.
5. When you're talking to customers, make positive comments about your operations personnel.
6. Once in a while, bring in donuts for the operations personnel in the morning.
7. Occasionally buy them pizza for lunch.
8. Occasionally buy someone in operations a coffee or cold drink.
9. When you make a mistake that causes someone extra work, apologize for your goof and thank him or her for bailing you out.
10. When a member of the support staff catches a mistake that you made and corrects it, given them a big thank you.

The more and better relationships you develop with people in your own company, as well as with the people who are in a position to send business your way, the higher the odds that you will be in a position to have not just everything you need in life, but many more of the things you want.

Even in today's difficult market, there is business -- customers -- out there your relationships can send your way. By treating everyone you meet like their ten feet tall and like they hung the moon, you'll discover what relationships can do for your sales volume.

Every salesperson is in a position to grow their market share by taking business away from the competition. Expand your relationships and watch your business expand, as well.

Bill Lee is the president of Lee Resources, Inc., a Greenville, SC-based consulting, training and publishing organization. He is the author of 30 Ways Managers Shoot Themselves in the Foot and Gross Margin: 26 Factors Affecting Your Bottom Line. For more information visit www.BillLeeOnline.com.