The education process-learning product information and gaining selling skills-is the beginning of your career in sales. Getting to know your product is essential. If you don’t know what your product will do for people, how will you know when you’ve found the right people to talk with about it? How will you know what to tell people to build their interest in it? Once you understand the wonderful benefits your product will bring to its new owners, then you’re ready to start earning an income. You begin that income-earning process with the first step in the selling cycle-prospecting. But very few of the people who need to prospect enjoy doing it, probably because they haven’t found out all the fun ways to prospect. They don’t have the right attitude about it. Maybe they don’t completely understand the critical importance of prospecting in the selling cycle.
Those salespersons who don’t understand the vital importance of prospecting are in a state that I call unconscious incompetence-one of four levels of competency that apply when learning anything new. Unconscious incompetence is the level you begin with whenever you’re introduced to anything new. It could be that you’ve never had a need to know before now. Yesterday, you were just happily tripping along through life completely unaware of the need for or skills involved in prospecting. But now you’re in selling.
Being aware of something but not knowing much about it is the second level of learning competency – conscious incompetence. At this level, you know you don’t know everything you need to know about the subject, whether the subject is prospecting or the composition of gases on the surface of Pluto. However, if you’re intent on selling acreage on Pluto to just the right prospects, you recognize the need to know about both of those subjects. At this level, you may be curious. You may be anxious about how much you don’t know. You may be intimidated by all the study ahead of you. Never fear. You can find out almost anything if you have the desire and discipline to do so. By following our coaching, you’ve taken the first step towards competence in prospecting. You’ve sought out expert advice. You’ve already jumped to level two. My goal is to help you get to level three.
Competency level three is conscious competence. At this point, you’re learning new information, skills, and ideas that will eventually help you master the topic of choice-in your case, prospecting. You’re reading, You’re listening to others. You’re experimenting with strategies and phraseology. You’re winning a little, losing at times, but analyzing everything so you can tweak it and make it better.
Now, my ultimate wish for you is for you to move to level four, unconscious competence. At this point, everything you’ve learned has become smoothly integrated into your overall selling skills package. You are operating primarily on reflex. The right words and deeds simply flow from you with nary a thought. Being a professional prospector has become second nature. You continue to study, but no longer have those anxiety feelings when he topic of prospecting is brought up. You have a million ideas on where and how to contact new prospects and you’re acting on them in a will-thought-out manner. You’ve become one of the top 5 percent of professionals in selling.
Have a wonderful day and please let me know if you need anything.