AVOID NEGATIVE PEOPLE AND SITUATIONS

There is nothing worse than talking about negative situations in the workplace. Avoid the water cooler or coffee room where people moan all day about how terrible things are. To break out of the slump, you need all your positive energy. Talking about bad stuff will only bring you down just when you need to feel great. For more about the power of a positive attitude, look back at Week 4.

SET A START DATE

Break your sales slide by getting back to the basics. You may want to increase the number of new daily contacts you make from 25 to 50 or even 100. There’s nothing like taking decisive action for breaking out of a slow period. Weeks 22 to 24 present some strategies for increasing your number of daily contacts.

BE COMMITTED

Breaking the sales slump is not easy, but it can be done. Continue to be committed. Once you recognize that you are in a sales slump, you can begin to initiate change. You also realize you have had these setbacks before and will probably have them again.

MAKE MARKETING A REGULAR ACTIVITY

If you make marketing a routine activity, something you do in good times and bad, you’ll find that your slumps come less frequently and don’t last as long. It’s the salespeople who ignore marketing when times are good and do it only when times are bad who find their sales valleys deeper and longer.

KEEP RECORDS

I encourage you to get involved in some day planning system. Prior to using a computer for everything, I relied heavily on my Franklin Day Planner. Google has a great free online calendar, which you can learn about by visiting www.google.com/calendar. You can even share calendars with friends, family members, and colleagues to help coordinate your schedules. If you have Microsoft Office, you can use Outlook’s Calendar to manage your schedule.

To be successful, you must be able to go back and look at a certain week, certain day, certain time frame, and say why your units or sales weren’t what you wanted them to be. Perhaps you weren’t marketing your prospecting calls the week before or perhaps you spent too much time on paperwork and not enough meeting customers. Records will tell you that.

TALK TO YOUR MANAGER ABOUT YOUR SALES DECLINE

If management doesn’t bring it up, approach your manager. Chances are your manager has experienced similar slumps before and has some idea about what’s wrong. At the very least, talking through the problem may relieve the feeling of isolation that comes with a slump.

LEARN FROM PAST MISTAKES

Think about what helped you in the past. Think about what hurt you in the past. A common myth is that successful people make few, if any, mistakes. This is rarely true. In fact, successful people tend to make more mistakes than others, because they take more risks. However, they usually avoid making the same mistake twice.

After every major undertaking, do a postmortem to evaluate what worked and what didn’t. Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t, so your investments of time, energy, and resources will have a more positive effect.

GET YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS INVOLVED

Make it a contest. For example, tell your friends or family that if you’re the top salesperson of the month, the following month you’ll take them to a theme park for a long weekend. If you’re the top salesperson of the week, the family gets to go out to dinner. Getting your family excited about your success will motivate them to motivate you with their support and suggestions.

LEARN TO COPE

You have to learn that sales slumps happen to everyone, even the top producers. You will get out of them. They will happen again. I can feel a sales slump coming long before anyone else notices. When I sense a slump, sometimes in the middle of the day, I get up from my desk, walk around the office, and tell myself that I just have to make things happen.

Ralph’s Rule: Slumps are inevitable, but they don’t have to come as often or last as long as you think they might.