The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich

Chapter 5

Game-Changers

The beauty of it all is that you own it all.

—Anthony Belli

 

I've never met a high-performance salesperson who didn't feel that he or she was entirely responsible for their success. I certainly take full credit for mine. High-performance reps like me “own”—that is, take responsibility for—the tenor and progress of every selling cycle and every outcome. We are the most skillful practitioners of the justly famous Oz Principle of Leadership Accountability®, which holds that success is attained through “a personal choice to rise above one's circumstances and demonstrate the necessary ownership to achieve a desired result.”¹ That is a most high-minded and highly regarded way to say what I learned on my way up: That to rise above your circumstances, you must first assess the obstacles, and then, in a way particular to you, hatch and carry through plans to surmount them.

Obviously, assessing comes first. Sometimes an obstacle is a hindrance, other times an excuse-provider, at still other times a leveraging device. I try to identify any self-made obstacles first, on the assumption that I can find a way to turn that negative into a positive. Then I look at the situation objectively. How can I turn the fact that my customer disliked the last rep from my company into an opportunity without throwing the former rep under the bus? I've found, as you will, that disarming approaches can be very rewarding. Everyone can be touched in a positive way. Find it! The baddest ...