Time to get serious: two magic words to make your business well known

OPINION: Over 30 years ago I sold sales training seminars and I had the opportunity to talk with some of the top salespeople in the country.

I have always been curious about what top sales people actually do to get their remarkable results. So one year I asked a dozen of the most successful salespeople in the country a very simple question. “When did you start to do really well in selling?”

I was intrigued by the answers I got.

Most of the top salespeople I spoke with all used the same two words in answering this question.

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They said “I started to do really well when I finally got serious about selling.” In other words, they made the decision to get really good at selling.

And it’s exactly the same with making your business well known.

The starting point is to get serious about making your business well known.

The first thing this means is that you mentally decide that over the next 12 to 18 months you are going to do a lot of things to make your business well known.

You understand that making your business well known will take a serious investment of time and resources. And you are willing to do that.

The same get serious rule applies to success in many areas of your life.

Take health and fitness, for example.

Many of us would like to be in better shape. We would like to tone up, slim down, have more energy and so on. And maybe one day we will do something about it.

However, if we don’t make the decision to get serious about our health and fitness it is very unlikely we will do the work involved to get in amazing shape.

Here’s a personal example

I’ve been wanting to get in better physical shape for a few years now. For fitness I rode a bicycle several times a week with some friends and that was all I did.

Over the last couple of years I’ve had a few involuntary dismounts from my bike. (Which is fancy language for saying I crashed my bicycle and had some injuries.)

These injuries took months of physiotherapy to fix and since my last crash in late 2021 I have not been back on my bike.

In March 2022 I got a painful back injury from lifting heavy furniture and discovered I had osteopetrosis in my spine. It took weeks and weeks of physio to get my back a little bit better and I was still feeling out of shape and not that great physically.

So I finally made the decision to get serious about getting in really good shape with my health and wellness.

As soon as I made that decision things changed.

I hired a superb personal trainer who trains me three times a week. I expect to use this personal trainer for many years as I find it much easier to do exercise when I have someone that I am accountable to.

I have started watching my diet and have made a few positive changes to what I eat and drink and a lot of other things as well.

I’ve also taken the long-term view on my health and fitness.

I want to get in amazing shape and stay in amazing shape. Because I have made the decision to get serious I am more than happy to invest money, time and effort to get in great shape.

Before I made this mental decision nothing really happened. In fact, a couple of years ago I bought a book written by two of the top personal trainers in the world.

The book showed the exact exercises to do to get in amazing shape. However, because I had not made the mental decision to get serious about health and fitness I read the book once and that was all I did with it.

In fact I actually gave the book away because after six months I had not used it.

Now here’s the bad news:

The strategies to make your business well known are simple to learn. And with regular practice (and a lot of effort) they work really well.

However the reality is that if you don’t make the decision to get serious about making your business well known I doubt you will put many of these strategies into action consistently.

So the main point of my column this week is very simple… Make the decision to get serious about making your business well known. Realise that this will require a significant investment of time, money and other resources. (And be willing to make that investment.)

In future Prosper columns I’ll share some of the strategies that work well to make your business well known. (And maybe even famous.)

Graham McGregor is a marketing advisor. You can get his free marketing guide ‘The Plan B Sales Solution’ at www.simplemarketinganswers.com.