Dedicate Yourself to Continuous Learning
You can learn anything you need to
learn to achieve any goal you can set
for yourself; there are no limits.
— BRIAN TRACY
To earn more, you must learn more. You are “maxed out” today at your current level of knowledge and skill. You cannot get more or better results by simply working harder using your present abilities. If you want to earn more in the future, you must learn and apply new methods and techniques. Remember the old saying: “The more you do of what you’re doing, the more you’ll get of what you’re getting.”
The fact is that we are experiencing an explosion of knowledge and technology that is unprecedented in human history. These advances are creating new competitors and driving our existing competition to develop better, faster, cheaper ways to get business. This is why continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in selling today.
The future belongs to the learners, not just to the hard workers. The highest paid salespeople spend much more time and money improving themselves and upgrading their skills than the average salesperson. As a result, they earn vastly more in any market, sometimes five and ten times as much.
At a seminar in San Diego recently, a salesman came up to me and told me an interesting story. He said that he was one of the top salespeople in his field, if not in his industry. He had regularly earned more than $100,000 per year and was highly respected by both his boss and his peers.
A year before, his boss had urged him to listen to my audio program “The Psychology of Selling.” He initially refused, saying that he didn’t need it. He was already doing better than most other people in his field.
Finally, he gave in and ordered the program, with the intention of listening to it once and then sending it back. When he received the program, he not only listened to it once, he listened again and again, month after month. In that one year, by practicing the ideas contained in that $70 program, he increased his personal income by $70,000, a return on his investment of 1,000 times!
Continuous learning is like an ongoing mental fitness program for sales champions, where you prepare and keep yourself in shape for intense competition. This is the attitude possessed by the highest paid people in the business.
Fortunately, keeping yourself at the top of your game in selling is much easier than in professional athletics. Sales fitness requires daily brainwork and application rather than the hours of sweating and hard physical exercise required for athletic competition. No matter how hard you work on developing yourself, you don’t have to take a shower afterward.
A continuous learning program in selling has three key parts. Consistent, persistent work in these three areas will lead inevitably to your becoming one of the highest paid salespeople in your field, with no exceptions. I have given this advice to hundreds of thousands of salespeople and not one of them has ever come back and said that this strategy didn’t work. In many cases, salespeople have doubled and tripled their incomes in as little as thirty days by the daily practice of these three continuous learning principles.
Leaders Are Readers
The first principle is simply for you to read continually in your field. Get up earlier each morning and read for one hour about selling. Put the newspaper aside. Leave the television off. Instead, read, underline, and make notes in a good book on selling strategies and tactics. Look for practical ideas you can use immediately. Turn them over in your mind. Imagine using them in your sales activities. Then, throughout the day, practice what you learned in the morning.
Sometimes people ask me what books to read. The answer is simple. Begin by asking other top salespeople for their recommendations. Almost all top salespeople have their own collections of sales books. There are currently more than 4,000 books on selling in print, with 50 to 100 new books coming onto the market each year. Begin building your own collection today.
If you read about selling for one hour each day, that will amount to about one book per week. One book per week will add up to 50 books per year. Since the average salesperson reads less than one sales book per year, if you were to read 50 books per year, that alone would give you “the winning edge” that will move you to the top of your sales force.
To earn a doctorate from a university, you would be required to read and distill 30 to 50 books into a dissertation that would synthesize the key ideas of these books into a new form. If you were to read and synthesize the best ideas of 30 to 50 books on selling every twelve months, you would achieve the equivalent of a doctorate in professional selling each year. You would probably become one of the best-informed and most competent salespeople of your generation in no time at all, just by reading one hour per day.
If you read 50 sales books per year for the next ten years, that would amount to 500 books. At the very least, you would need a new house just to hold your books, and you would be able to afford it as well.
Listen and Learn
The second part of continuous learning is for you to listen to audio programs in your car. Audio learning has been described as “the greatest advance in education since the invention of the printing press.”
As a sales professional, you spend between 500 and 1,000 hours behind the wheel each year. This amounts to between twelve and twenty-five 40-hour weeks per annum, or the equivalent of three to six months of working time in your car each year. Twelve to twenty-five 40-hour weeks is equal to one to two full-time university semesters that you spend driving each year.
According to the University of Southern California, you can get the equivalent of full-time university attendance by listening to educational audio programs as you drive from place to place.
Turn your car into a learning machine, into a “university on wheels.” Enroll at “automobile university” and attend full time for the rest of your career. It can change your life, as it has changed mine.
A young salesman in Pittsburgh approached me at a seminar recently and told me his story. He said that he got his first sales job when he finished college four years before. To start him off, his boss gave him “Psychology of Selling” to listen to in his car.
But he didn’t like to listen to audio programs in his car. He preferred to listen to music as he went from call to call, a behavior practiced by most lower level salespeople, who earn little and who are going nowhere in their careers.
He therefore took the audio program and put it in the trunk of his car. Whenever his boss asked him if he was listening to the program, he replied, “I carry it in my car all the time!”
At the end of his first year, his boss called him in and told him he was going to have to let him go. He was the lowest selling salesperson in the company during a period when the industry was booming and everyone else was doing well. The boss gave him thirty days’ notice to clear up his accounts and hand over his prospects to other salespeople.
At the end of the meeting, the boss asked curiously, “Did you ever listen to Brian Tracy’s audio program? I can’t imagine that you could be doing so poorly if you had practiced some of those ideas.”
The young salesman, Bill, told me that he felt terrible. He couldn’t look his boss in the eye. There he was being fired from his first job for poor performance, and he had been misleading his boss about listening to a simple audio program for an entire year. His income for the last twelve months was only $22,000. And he was a college graduate!
He went out to his car and got the program from the trunk. He resolved to listen to the first cassette on the way home so that he could at least look his boss in the eye. He stuck the tape into the player as he left the parking lot and began to listen.
He told me that that experience was a transforming moment in his life. He had never listened to an educational audio program before. He was amazed at how many good ideas were contained on a single tape. He kept starting and stopping it, rewinding and replaying key parts, all the way home.
He began to understand why he had done so poorly in sales in the previous year. He had good product knowledge but no idea whatsoever about how to prospect, qualify, identify needs, make a professional presentation, or ask for the order. He had thought that selling was something that came naturally. He realized, for the first time, that selling was both an art and a science, with a specific methodology and process.
He listened to my program nonstop, every driving moment. By the end of that month, his sales had jumped. His boss gave him one more month. In the next thirty days, his sales increased again and he was taken off probation. The next month, his sales went up again. He was on his way.
He listened to the audio program over and over, before and after every sales call. He learned how to get more and better telephone appointments, how to make better presentations, answer objections, and get more referrals from his customers. He learned how to deal with price concerns and how to close the sale thirty-two different ways. And with each new technique he learned and practiced, his sales and his confidence increased.
In his second year, he made $46,000. In his third year, he earned $94,000. In his fourth year in selling, he had earned $175,000. He was already on track to make $250,000 in the coming year.
“Last night,” he said, “I picked up my first new car, a Mercedes, and drove it to this seminar to celebrate. Continuous learning changed my life, and I still listen to audio programs every minute that I am in my car.”
When we were teenagers, we got into the habit of driving around with our friends and listening to music. We formed the association that driving is for friends and fun. Many adults never get over this conditioned behavior. Instead, at a time of incredible competition, information explosion, and obsolescence of knowledge, they are still floating through life, driving around, failing to take advantage of one of the very best learning methodologies ever discovered.
Don’t let this happen to you. Never let your car be running without educational audio programs playing. Make every minute count. One great idea or technique can change the course of your career and dramatically increase your income.
Learn from the Experts
The third part of continuous learning is for you to take all the training you can get. Attend seminars and courses on professional selling. Ask for advice from others on the most helpful courses they have taken. Be aggressive about seeking out training in your community, and be prepared to travel if necessary. Many of the top salespeople I know will fly hundreds and even thousands of miles to attend sales conferences. And the difference that it makes in their sales results is amazing.
My life, and the lives of many of the highest paid professionals I know, has been changed dramatically as the result of attending a single sales course, boot camp, or seminar. Sometimes the ideas and strategies contained in one program have catapulted a person from rags to riches.
Practice the 3 Percent Rule
Here is a rule that will guarantee your success—and possibly make you rich: Invest 3 percent of your income back into yourself. Invest 3 percent of however much you earn back into becoming even better at what you did to earn the money in the first place.
When you begin investing in yourself regularly, your whole attitude toward yourself, your future, and your finances will change for the better. You will become more skilled and knowledgeable. You will become more serious about your craft and your customers. You will respect yourself more and be more respected by others.
For every dollar you invest back into yourself to improve your ability to earn even more, you will get a return of ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, and even one thousand times your investment. Sometimes, in one paragraph of a book, one side of an audio program, or one session of a seminar, you will learn a breakthrough idea that will double your income and save you years of hard work.
When you invest 3 percent of your income back into yourself, year after year, you will eventually become one of the most skilled and highest paid professionals in your business. Regular investment in yourself and your skills will virtually guarantee your success.
I have countless friends around the country and throughout the world who started at the very bottom in selling and who are today earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year as the result of continuous learning. And anything they have done, you can do as well.
ACTION EXERCISES
Develop an action plan for personal and professional development. Prepare a “training schedule” for yourself exactly as if you were training for a marathon or a big competition.
Become a “do-it-to-yourself project.” Select the books you are going to read and block out time each day to read a specific number of pages. Determine the audio programs that can help you the most and begin listening to them. Resolve to attend one sales seminar every three months and discipline yourself to stick to your plan.
Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. School is never out for the professional. The race is on, and you are in it. Be sure that you do everything you have to do, in terms of preparation, to win. Never stop learning and growing in your field.