You can Enjoy Peace of Mind by Earning more Money and going home a Winner every day

In order for you to get ahead in life, you must have a winning attitude because your attitude is the most important tool in the sales person's arsenal.

Granted attitude is not the only tool but it definitely is your most important attribute when it come to the art of selling.

The reason most folks will agree that attitude is the most important is because with the right kind of attitude you can overcome all kinds of adversity.

When I was a young man I was probably not much different than most of the young people of today.

My attitude was not the best in the world. I was guilty of comparing myself against everyone else. All of this unhealthy comparison caused me to have feelings of inferiority that were a little out of proportion to what was actually real. True I had not had a lot of experience in the real business world but inexperience is something that can be overcome rather quickly.

Most people will not believe this story when I tell it but it is the God's honest truth.

This is the story about the time I found a wore out paper back book at kind of a flea market (AKA) second hand store in Lubbock, Texas for the gigantic price of ten cents. The year was 1965 and had to be around March of that year because spring was in the air.

The district office of the company I worked for had moved from Amarillo, TX to Lubbock, TX shortly after the first of the year. I had just got my first promotion to district field trainer.

District field trainers, are DFT's as we were known, were the lowest echelon of management. I received a generous override of five percent on every sale the people assigned to me made until they reached Sales Master status and at that point they received the five percent on themselves.

My major problem was the fact that although I was now a District Field Trainer I had no trainees, nada, none what so ever.

The District manager put an ad in the Sunday paper for me so that I could interview and hire a few people for my sales crew. It was Friday afternoon and we had just barely beat the cutoff at three o'clock that afternoon to get the ad into the Sunday paper. I remember it was not a big ad, just a little four line classified blind ad that cost about fifteen dollars at that time.

Like I said, I had this inferiority complex that most young people have and I thought that I knew nothing about interviewing anyone for a job much less hiring them.

Later that Friday afternoon I was walking around over on the east side of town waiting on a prospect to come home from work and I saw this kind of rundown secondhand store and I walked in. They had an old card table just loaded down with old paper back books, mostly Westerns and Romance novels. There was a book that had been scooted off on the floor, face down with the back cover torn off of it. When I reach down to pick the book up and put it back on the table for the store owner, I glanced at the title on the front cover.

My God, what a title! It was called "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill. It instantly hit me, "If I can think, then I can get Rich."

So I asked the store owner, "How much?" and the proprietor said, "ten cents!" So I handed him a dime.

I don't think my prospect ever came home that evening but I didn't care. I was reading this book that I was only understanding about every third word and even less of the ideas are how they worked but it was GREAT!! All I had to do was think and I could get RICH!!

I went home that evening and read till late in the evening. After work Saturday I read some more and then most of Sunday I read still more. I finished the book fairly early Sunday afternoon and had time to go back through and read some more of the most interesting passages.

I still could not figure out what the secret was that the Arthur kept talking about but I knew one thing, I never ever felt the same about anything from that day forward, even though I really wasn't sure why at that point.

Monday morning things really began to happen. The phone was ringing off the hook at the office and I made six appointments with potential salespeople to talk with me that afternoon.

I set up a group interview for that afternoon and all six showed up. I talked to all six applicants at the same time in our conference/training room. The potential sales crew members were all about my age.

You have to remember that this is my first hiring interview presentation and I didn't have a clue of what to do other than what I had learned from just listening to this manager or that manager over the last six months I had been working there.

I could teach people the presentation, closing skills and how to overcome objections to a fault. Thinking back I had probably already become one of the best young trainers in the company but really didn't know it at the time.

But first let me tell you what reading this book, "Think and Grow Rich" did for me and for the six guys I had in the room with me. If you had heard me you would have sworn that I had been interviewing and hiring for years. I stood tall, I never wavered in my speech and I told them like it is. I explained what I had been learning from the reading of my ten cent treasure chest of ideas the last three days. All six hung on every word I spoke. I could do no wrong. I was on some kind of an emotional high.

I wrote out this impressive grandiose plan as it came to me on the black board in front of me. I was just making it up as I went.

There was a small town about twenty or thirty miles away called Littlefield, TX. I told them the plan I had in mind was to train at the district office all week until they knew the presentation backwards and forwards and also knew everything that I knew about selling. Good, Bad and Indifferent.

I then told them that I was going to load all six of them up in my car next Monday morning and we were all going to Littlefield to start working.

I explained that this way they would not have any Car expenses, only lunch and a light meal around five o'clock in the afternoon to pay for.

I told them the first day would be the hardest because I would need to walk with each one until I made an appointment and then I would walk and coach each one of them until they also made an appointment.

At that point I would let the recruit go on their own and then I would go back to the car and scoot over a block are two and do it all over again with the next trainee.

I remember one of the six applicants doubted if he could make any money doing this. I said, "What!" He told me that he was an outside house painter by trade and when the wind blows he couldn't paint outside because of all the sand and grit that gets in the paint and ruins the job. He said this was the reason he needed to find another way to make a living. I agreed, with him because if you have ever been to Lubbock, TX or ever go there, you will find that there is a healthy breeze blowing most of the time.

I did not know how much money an outside housepainter made or could hope to make at that time but I felt he probably was having it rough or else he would not be wasting his time talking to me about a straight commission job of selling Encyclopedias door to door.

This is what I told him. I said, " If you will do exactly what I show you needs to be done, exactly the way I show you and you put in as much effort as I expect you to do, then three Fridays from now I will be handing you and anybody else in the room who does the same thing as you a check for at least a thousand dollars. OK?"

I had all of the confidence in the world in all six applicants and they in turn had all of the confidence in me. In fact all six came to work for me on the terms that I just described.

We trained hard all week and I made sure they really learned their stuff. We met as agreed the next Monday morning at seven o'clock and we all climbed into my big Buick sedan and off we went to Littlefield, TX.

We went first to the Police station and I paid for permits for all seven of us. It was two dollars each at that time. I then took each trainee one by one and trained them at the door with live prospects how to make appointments and get referrals. I had all of them trained by eleven o'clock that morning.

At one o'clock I picked them all up and we went to a little drive in restaurant that had inside service and we ate lunch. We had a sales meeting during lunch and went over what had happen during the short time each of them had been in the field by themselves.

They each had some success stories. No orders yet but each had made several appointments and had places to go that night. I had the appointments I had made while training them as well, so things were looking good.

I put them all back on the street and picked them back up at five that afternoon for dinner. One of them had already written his first order so I bought him his supper as a little reward for being the first in the crew to sell an order. Naturally it was the house painter who broke the ice first.

I put them all back on the street again and told them I would start looking for them around nine o'clock. They were leaving a really bright colored brochure on the front doors of houses where they were inside giving presentations are talking. This way, I could find them any time I needed to by shining my heavy duty flash light on the screen doors in the area if it was dark.

That first day, three of my people wrote a deal plus I had written an order my self. The three that didn't sell the first day still felt they had some terrific prospects for later on in the week.

We met Tuesday morning and did it all over again. We worked all week in Littlefield and then moved over to the little towns next to it for the next two weeks. We must have knocked every last door in those three towns, two if not three times, during out little sales blitz.

A typical district office at the time all of this was happening normally sold about fifty to seventy five approved orders per month. That is, credit approved, verified and paid on. This was done by a crew of fifteen to twenty salespeople mostly working leads.

My crew working in these small towns with populations at that time of about ten to fifteen thousand sold on average twenty five or more paid orders per week for the next three weeks.

I should mention that all of my people got checks for well over one thousand dollars each week for all three weeks in a row. I should also tell you that three of the six salespeople quit after the third week. Why, I know you want to ask. The best I could tell is they just could not handle the success or the hard work. We were working twelve hour days, six days a week or roughly seventy two hours a week. If I knew then what I know now, I could have kept them with me by throttling back a little and giving them a well earned vacation.

I have since learned that you can make a lot more money working four days a week, than you ever could working six or seven. It is just a given that you need the other three days to charge your batteries and hit the ground running come Monday morning.

I am sure the house painter took his thirty five hundred or so dollars and used that as seed money to become a big paint contractor. I know he must have moved some where that the wind doesn't blow every day because I never ran across him again in Lubbock after that.

You are probably wondering what in the world did all of this have to do with the dusty old book, "Think and Grow Rich." Well everything, if I had not read the book that week end I don't think any of this would have happened. Even though I did not understand everything I was reading and probably still don't. I did learn enough to understand that you have to be a positive thinker and you also need to have a master mind group. (My Sales Crew) With a lot of their help and a little guidance on my part we made it happen.

After the first three weeks, myself, the other three crew members and a few new people I would add from time to time did well for several years. We no longer worked at the insane pace we worked that first three weeks but learned to work and earn at a more moderate but consistent pace.

All on my own I have come to the conclusion that it makes no difference what so ever if you believe in positive thinking or not at first. If you will read the books and expose your self to the subject and then just fake it. In other words live life like you believe in what you are reading and your subconscious mind will cause you to do the things that will create this new winning attitude.

You are developing a winning attitude by constantly selling your self on the idea that you can and will do the things that have a high priority to meet the goals for your success.

Incidentally I can now boil the whole book's message down into one sentence. It is simply this.

You will become who and what you think you are, no more, no less.

A winning attitude will go a long way to help you do a better job because with the right type of attitude you can learn to believe in your self, your products and your people.

If you have the desire and would like to make something like this story that you just read happen in your life on a grander or perhaps a smaller scale come on over to my website. http://www.thesellingfool.com/ You will learn rather quickly how you to, with the right attitude adjustment, can become a selling fool by starting down the road to ultimate sales success.

Incidentally The Selling Fool website is the place where the Wind doesn't blow and the Sun Shines all day, every day.

Thank you,

Billy J Gibson
thesellingfoolbjg@yahoo.com
http://www.thesellingfool.com/