Zero, nada, a big fat donut. That was my October this year.
October 2019 marks the first month in 4 years that I was not on a plane to see a client and did not have a client locally.
So, I am going to do what most in sales are afraid to do. I am going to talk about it.
Impostor syndrome is real, no matter who you are or how long you have been doing it.
Here is how I handled it.
First I looked at what’s been happening in the last few months and found the things that changed.
1) A website lead form malfunction that occurred over the summer which slowed the pipeline down. This is on me for not doing something sooner about it.
2) I started sharing some thoughts around #mentalhealth in sales and wondered if that scared people away. Possibly, but that’s ok, they will come around. Mental health will be the biggest recruiting issue companies face in 2020, 2021, and beyond.
3) Competition – Things are getting “spicy” in the consulting world.
So I had to move forward. I did, I doubled down on my own process.
Check out the 10 things I’ve done to change my world. Some on my own, others with help from Scott Leese and Betts Recruiting starting next week!
I hosted my first live training in Austin Texas on November 6 with my good friend Scott Leese. It went smashingly well.
I made changes to my cold/warm outreach programs and started seeing positive returns.
I will be making a major announcement with a new partner for 2020 in the coming weeks, although it may have been announced by the time this is posted.
Launched my newsletter, “Richard’s Thoughts”.
Wrote the next 13 weeks of blog posts and tee’d them up!
Added new services to our offerings including process creation and audit, cold call bootcamps, and management training courses
I’ve launched new packages to our online sales training that includes special pricing and 1:1 time live coaching.
And this is probably the most important, I’ve been using meditation via @headspace to improve specifically around focus and calming the mind. This alone has provided the clarity I needed to drive 1-9
Guess what, I went from zero to hero. I went from nothing in October, to having my second best month of my business in 6 years. No, that’s not from sandbagging.
Looking back on it now, almost every one of those things I did felt like a HUGE risk. I was obviously suffering from impostor syndrome in sales.
Now looking back, I think, “Wow, all those things were so easy to do, I just had to stop overthinking them and do them.”
Some were “harder” than others of course, but in the end, I was the one holding me back, nobody else.
How do you work your way out of a slump?
