The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich

Chapter 15

Ready, Set, Improvise: Using Visualization

Hindsight is always 20-20.

—Billy Wilder

 

Poor people often dream of being someone and somewhere else. I spent countless hours imagining myself in the Yankees dugout and out in centerfield. My self-image was entirely invested in such notions; no one could, or ever even tried, to convince me that the future held anything but baseball fame for me. Imagination is powerful stuff and visualization—the act and art of playing out a scenario in the privacy of your mind—is a very effective way to use the imagination to create a desired outcome. You can't use visualization to control a customer's behavior, of course. That would be magic. But for a Street-Smart salesman, visualization is serious business indeed, because it's a huge part of the difference between a daydream and a plan. Visualization, you could say, is daydreaming with intention.

Every high-performance athlete visualizes victory against specific opponents. Why? Because visualization is a powerful way of convincing yourself that you can win—because you have seen it happen in your mind's eye. Not once, but time after time! Repetition is key to unlocking the full power of visualization. The more often you envision yourself successfully navigating tough situations and getting to “Yes,” the more at ease you will be when the time comes, the more comfortable you will be in the role of a high-performance salesperson.

Actors read and reread a script before they rehearse in three ...