Goodbye 2024! Hello 2025. You may still be thinking about last year and the accounts you missed and the ones you gained. Last year is over. Now it’s time to think about 2025 and your sales for the new year. Why not start focusing this year on what successful people do not do?
What successful salespeople do not do: Ruminate on their past.
I’ve seen too many unsuccessful salespeople who live their selling life in the rear-view mirror. That’s how rumination starts.
Rumination is a cognitive process that involves repeatedly dwelling on negative thoughts and experiences. When you ruminate you focus on the same negative thoughts or events like all the deals you lost or missed out on. Then you go over the same thoughts again and again. You don’t focus on the positive like what you learned even if you missed the deal.
What happens when you ruminate? You feel worse again about the lost deals. Ruminating about your bad sales experiences is a waste of time unless you do something else.
What do successful salespeople do instead?
It’s all right to look back at your lost deals. Successful salespeople do that. Then they ask what went wrong. It’s time they learn why their strategies and actions failed. They certainly don’t repeat what failed. They certainly don’t focus on what they did wrong.
Now that they know what not to do and why, they move on. They don’t focus on their failures. Woe is me is not part of their vocabulary because that is a waste of their time.
Successful salespeople make a new plan next.
It’s not enough just to know what to do and avoid the actions that lead to failure. Now you have to execute. Did you lack some product knowledge that caused you to lose the sale? Now would be a good time to increase product knowledge. Was a weak partner the cause of a loss? Start now looking for a better, more aligned partner. Doing nothing is not an option. Successful salespeople do something different than they did before.
Your time and your thinking are two of your most important sales tools. Use them wisely!!! It’s not about perfection. Your thinking should be just about being just a little bit better. It’s been said that even one step a day gets you 365 steps farther in a year. Kudos to you if it turns out in 2025 that you get much better results.
Best wishes for a very successful 2025!