Published Tuesday, November 20, 2007
in Strategic eNews
Use your selling skills in an unconventional way to reach a new level of success.
In the previous article, we talked about the importance of creating structures in your business that support the kind of life you want. These structures allow you to maximize your freedom in three areas — time, money, and relationships. In that article, we focused on the first of these — time — and talked about how to shape your business so that you can work less, earn more money, and have time in your life for everything you want to do outside your business. Now let’s focus on money — specifically, your freedom to make as much money as you want, limited only by your ability to create value for others.
Most entrepreneurs are good at selling. Yet, they often get stuck at a certain income level despite the fact that no one else is dictating how much they earn. They hit a ceiling and can’t seem to get past it. They increasingly find themselves spending their time dealing with growing complexity and frustration instead of generating more revenue.
Breaking through this ceiling takes a slight shift in thinking. This shift lets you use the skills you already have to solve the issues of running a growing business so you can get back to doing what creates your best results. In other words, you can use selling to get more time to spend selling.
The conventional type of sale — what we call “The Money Sale” — is the exchange that happens between you and your clients and customers. But money is just one of three important ingredients of growth that your sales skills can help you obtain. There are two other kinds of sales that are equally important — in fact, they are essential to making more money sales possible. These are what we call “The Freedom Sale” and “The Capability Sale.” The reason these two are less recognized is that they happen inside your organization rather than in the conventional sales environment of the marketplace.
One of the wrenching things that happens to entrepreneurs as they move from the “Front Stage” of their business with clients and customers to the “Back Stage” with their team members is that they think they have to be a different person. They know about delegation and may be convinced about its benefits, but they still don’t do it as often or as easily as they should. Why? Because they feel delegation has something to do with “managing people” and think they aren’t good at this, or they just don’t have much energy for it.
But what if you got to be the same person Back Stage as you are Front Stage? As an entrepreneur, you’re already adept at selling people on the possibility of things that don’t yet exist. Those same skills can come into play with your team — for example, when you sell them on the difference they make by doing the job well, or when you get them excited about the potential impact of a project on the company’s growth and what kind of opportunities this could generate for them.
Many people’s idea of delegation is along the lines of sliding something under the door. We affectionately refer to these as “drive-by delegations.” But when you approach a delegation as a sale, you’re not only capturing an opportunity to free yourself up or add capability, you’re also taking into account what’s in it for the other person. You’re using your best abilities to find a way to align your team members’ or strategic partners’ goals for a bigger future with your own.
As an entrepreneur, results are what you get paid for, not time and effort. With a finite amount of time and attention, you have to be judicious about where you spend your resources. Using your selling skills to free up time and energy and add new capabilities to your organization gives you the opportunity to make as much money as you want — while actually increasing your freedom and enjoyment in life.