(Part two)
In part one of this column (FCNews, Sept. 14/21), I talked about how a bleak mindset can negatively impact not only sales expectations but also performance. I recalled a conversation I had with another executive, a guy who has been in this business a long time, and he told me something I still remember to this day. He said he tells his sales reps the same thing at the start of every year: “Something crazy is going to happen every year.” None of us knows what it is yet, but it’s going to happen, and their job is to figure out how to hit their number anyway. Experience shows if you have already decided the market is against you, the end user feels it the second they approach you. People pick up on that whether they show it or not. As a result, you might present smaller or steer the client towards the affordable product and the low bid. Worse, you may even dissuade them from signing at all without realizing it. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In this column, I will demonstrate how having a more positive outlook can have a tangible effect on actual outcomes.
Imagine a scenario where the salesperson at a nearby competing location refuses to let slower traffic color their outlook or mood. When walk-in traffic dries up, they don’t sit and wait for it to come back. They go get it. They search through social media and find the designers in their area that are remodeling beautiful homes, they’re sending email blasts and cold calling builders and restoration companies who need a good flooring partner. They are promoting themselves on their own social media pages, asking their suppliers for ideas and leads, and finding any dang way to make themselves the easiest person in town to work with. They are building a referral pipeline that keeps producing when the showroom is dead, because they’re actively building it. Same market, same headlines, and the same tariffs. One associate is becoming a product of their environment and the other is making their environment a product of them. The difference was never the market conditions.
That is the backup generator. The builder relationship you cultivated last spring is the sale that saves your fall. The designer who trusts you is the account that carries you through the quarter when retail traffic falls off a cliff. None of that gets built by a seller who spent the downturn explaining the downturn.
I’ll paraphrase one of our late, great presidents who said not to pray for easy lives, but pray to be stronger men and women. That is the entire mindset. You don’t get to pick the year you’re handed. You only get to decide whether you are resilient enough to hit your number within it.
The reps who win in the down years are not the ones who caught a break. They are the ones who planned for the break to never come and went to work anyway. They assumed the year would try to knock them off their number, and they built the muscle to make it up somewhere else. Different accounts. Different products. More line drives. That is a mindset, and it is one you can and should choose.
So, yes, assume there’s disruption on the horizon or even in the current moment in time—then go hit your sales goals anyway.
Mark Botros is vice president of sales & marketing for Jaeckle Distributors, a Wisconsin-based flooring and surfacing distributor. A Dallas native, Botros is a second-generation floor covering professional with over a decade of management experience in distribution and manufacturing.
