Success Champions
You don’t need to get motivated you just need to start! By Donnie Boivin
I After we hung up the phone a huge cheer went across the room. You would’ve thought I’d won the championship game with a 90-yard touchdown pass.
was standing in front of a room filled with salespeople fielding questions—a normal day for me when I was doing sales training. Teach a little, train a little, then answer questions. These salespeople were typical; some rockstars, some newbies, and some middle-of-the-road folks just getting by. I like fielding questions. It forces me to stay on my toes and think on my feet. Luckily, I have a lot of experience doing it. A young lady who’d just started her sales career raised her hand waiting to ask a question. This was a little unusual for me. I was used to people just shouting out their questions. It took a second to see her hand in a mouse-like gesture waving at me. Finally getting my attention in a soft, almost inaudible voice she asks me
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a question that set me on a path of learning and self-discovery. “How do I find the motivation to go prospecting when I don’t feel like doing it?” I don’t usually have to pause after questions, but I caught myself for two full seconds pondering how to respond to her. I didn’t want just a shoot-from-the-hip answer. I could tell she was really looking for advice. “You just do it and motivation comes,” I said in my typical nobullshit, direct and to-the-point way (that I don’t always pull off in a nurturing manner). What I said felt right but I had no evidence to back it up. She looked at me a bit puzzled and I saw a lot of the room nodding their heads. “Motivation does not come before the action. It comes as a result of the action,” I went on to say. She asked for an example. “Well I don’t feel motivated to make cold calls right now because I’m teaching,” I said. The room laughed. But they stopped laughing when I walked over, grabbed a landline phone, laid it on the table in front of me and asked the room to Google a manufacturing company. It took sixty seconds or so before someone shouted, “I got one!” “Give me the CEO’s name and phone number,” I said. Taking about four more minutes the group finally came up with the details. I asked