Recently during one of my trainings, i have learnt something very important that i personally would like to share with everyone. This is especially useful for people who are interested in doing sales but having problems closing their deals despite lots of hardwork are put in. Have a checklist with yourself and you see if you have been doing the right things.

K – Knowledge: Basically in doing any sales job, knowledge about the products are very important. In fact if you don’t have basic ideas of how the product works then i believe you can’t close any deal. Certain profession requires specialised knowledge and that is when you really got to know your stuff inside out. Such jobs are ususally quite highly paid because not many people can acquire such expertise and the people are not so-easily replaceable. One good example is doctor or lawyer. However if you are in any sales job, you don’t have to be highly educated to be good in closing but at least you must know all your products in order to provide unbiased services.

A – Attitude: Having the right attitude is important in the sales process. The reason is simple: As sales person, we face alot of challenging situations every single day and if you are having attitude problem, how do you expect to conquer every single one peacefully? With the correct attitude, you are more willing to be open to new ideas and adapt to changes. Some people that i know always think that they are correct and there is no need to change. There is a whole lot of attittude people out there with similar thinking. Hence mix with the positive people to have positive attitude! As the old saying goes: Attitude determines your altitude!

S – Skills: What i am refering to here is the soft skills. Soft skills are something that can’t be taught and are never taught in schoo! A person have to put in effort and time to learn from others to acquire it. In fact, soft skills is more important in closing a deal because most of the time a sales is made because of personal relationship. This skill is also useful when it comes to deal with relationship with your loved ones hence find someone you know that have excellent soft skills to get him to teach you the way to have it.

H – Habits: Some habits are good and bad. So what is really a good habit because what maybe good to one person may differs from the others. In my opinion, as long as the habit can help you to become more focus and discipline in closing your deals then it is good. One good example of such habit is the habit of being punctual. Can you imagine you are late for every single meeting with your clients? What kind of impression is formed when he sees that? I don’t think he is willing to trust you with his money for investment. Another good habit in sales is to make a point to meet at least 10 new people per week (5 days). It’s because with that, the chances of closing cases can be high since more people are met. Habits are formed by repeating it over and over again for 21 days! Studies have shown that all habits are formed if a person will to repeat the actions for 3 weeks. Hence start forming a new habit now!

The rating among these four things are as follow: Attitude being the top follows by Habit, Skills and Knowledge. Therefore the good news is that you don’t have to be a degree holder in order to sell, you just need to change you mindset and you be a successful sales person!

Thank God that my attitude in life took a massive change when i entered army and after which i met my current boss, Merry Riana! In 2003, i went in for my national service for a good 2 and 1/2 half years and during which, i have learnt a lot of things about attitude. Few things that i learnt are that attitude determines the amount of work that can be done and types of friends that you attract. Sometimes in life especially in army, we are forced to do work that we don’t like but it’s for the sake of our boss. So often than not, when we are tasked to do something, some of us just simply have the heck-care attitude and refuse to do anything. So what happen? The poor kind guy will have to pick up the stuff and do it all by himself.  Sometimes, when a platoon of guys were supposed to book out early but because of some jokers having attitude problem, the rest of them were being punished to book out late.

However we know that things can be better if the rest of the guys have the attitude that if things got to be done, let’s do it fast and stop complaining. If we are supposed to clean the area then just do it. Don’t be lazy and push the work to others. I believe in this saying “What you sows is what you reap” Next time, those guys who are lazy will receive their fair share of ‘punishment’ in one of the areas of life.

I also strongly believed that attitude really determines how successful a person can be. Be it in career, relationship or even health. It’s all linked up with attitude. Just look around the successful people around you or those you came across in magazines, do they have similar traits? Yes they have! All of them seem to possess the same kind of positive attitude towards their life. They take responsibility for their attitude and be aware that their result lies within their hand.

My boss, Merry Riana, possesses a very strong positive attitude. She is the type that believes success comes with hard work and good attitude. It’s her who changes how i live my life. Now i felt that with good attitude, you can survive in anywhere you go. You can go far! The success of your career is not determine by the economy but yourselves. If you believe that when times are good, you should do well and if times are bad, it’s normal to be lousy then i can say that you will be lousy!

A person with a power attitude looks differently, behaves differently, breathes differently and talk differently. Their aura is very strong that anyone that comes near them can feel it! These people are just normal people but what makes them so special are the ‘food’ that goes into their brain. They never allow negative things to go inside them. They ‘reject’ the negative and only invite positive things/words/thinking into their life. That is the power of attitude!

Mix more with such people and you will eventually become like him/her. Like the saying goes: “Birds of same feather flocks together”  So now you got to ask yourself two questions: ” Are my friends around me ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ and “Am i attracting the negative people into my life”