Why Winners Win

9 Winners are doers

Over the years, I have seen many seminar junkies who use seminar attendance as a way of forestalling action. These people never succeed.

Others seek out winners and ask for their advice, but never do anything with that advice. These people fare no better than the seminar junkies. They want to talk about success instead of actually doing something about it.

Winners win because they learn what they need to do to be successful, and then they do it. For winners, life is an action fest, not a talk fest. Winners are doers.

Jack Collis advises, ‘Be positive, believe in yourself, trust your intuition, be decisive and get on with it.' As the Persian proverb goes, ‘Not everyone who chased something ever caught it, but those who caught it had chased it.' Have a go!

When Shannon Goodson was asked for her definition of a sales professional, she said, ‘A truly professional salesperson is an individual who has the ability and emotional discipline necessary to make cold calls when they're necessary but who has been trained so well they never have to.'

I agree with most of this, though not with the word ‘never'. In the early years of our careers, we must build a pipeline of referral business, and this takes time. It begins with cold calling strangers, then following them up over the medium to long term, turning strangers into clients, then into referral business. Through cold calling we meet strangers; through consistent follow-up we turn strangers into clients, and then ...