Dr. Henry Emerson Fordick said, “Picture yourself vividly defeated and that alone will make victory impossible. Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success.”
Let me share a real life story about visualization and let you ponder how it might relate to your sales performance. Several years ago I moved back to Salt Lake City after spending seventeen years working back East. My sales career read almost like a storybook, working for two major Fortune Fifty companies and experiencing success at almost every turn. I was blessed with the opportunity to sit at the feet and learn from the masters of sales and business. It was a great experience, one for which I will ever be grateful.
Finding myself back in Salt Lake, I wanted to do something that I had dreamed about for some time but never felt that the time and place was right, due to frequent corporate moves. I wanted to build and own several duplexes as a means of financial investment and retirement income. After several moves, my mind set was to find the opportunities here and not to move around the country as I had done before. Once we became settled in a home, the first things I did was to find a piece of property to build my first duplex. My search successfully found a building lot with a small cottage nestled on the back end of the property almost hidden from view with dense foliage of trees, bushes and shrubs. This was the perfect place to build my first rental property.
Six years later I found myself standing on the sidewalk in front of my little over grown cottage still trying to visualize what to build. I knew it would be a duplex, but beyond that I didn’t know. On this particular day as I peered deep into the “jungle” of vegetation, I began to visualize what the duplex would look like. I could plainly see a side-by-side “townhouse” style property with a slight off-set for each unit and a roof line showing a change in elevation and ridgeline. I could plainly see the South facing entry for both units with a private sidewalk running to the back of the property. There were two double garages along the back edge of the property line.
My mind took me to the inside was a dining room and living room were on either side of the formal entry hall. The hall continued to the back and opened into a large family room adjoining a large and open kitchen with a wide counter top and bar stools. There was an eat-in kitchen nook for casual dining. There was a stairway leading from the family room to the basement with a large bedroom, full bath, large TV room and a storage room that would be the envy of any property owner. From the formal entry hall was a stairway leading to the top level with a laundry room at the top of the stairs, two bedrooms sharing a “Jack-and-Jill” bathroom and then the master suite with an over sized tub, separate showing and walk-in closet.
I don’t know how long I was standing on the sidewalk with this visualization running through my head, but it was real, and for the first time in the six years since I purchased the property, I knew exactly what I was going to build and how it would look. I immediately drove to the office of one of my friends who was an architect and described to him what I had seen in this daydream. He started to make some sketches and within an hour or so he had captured on paper what I had seen. Within a couple of weeks he had elevations and floor plans drawn. We made a few changes to those first drawings and within a couple more weeks we had plans that were presented to the city.
The city required a few changes to meet their building requirements and within two months of standing on the sidewalk visualizing what kind of a building to construct on my property, my builder was tearing down the little cottage and starting constructing on my new duplex. Now, why did it take six years to start something that I new I wanted six years earlier? The answer is simple; I had no vision. Once I was able to visualize what I wanted to build, it became a reality. The reality took time, activity and money, but nothing happened without the visualization.
Sales success is no different than the story I have just shared with you. Sales people can spend a whole career doing very little compared to what they are capable of doing because they have no vision of what is possible. They perform at a level comparable to others in their company with no comprehension that they could do far better if they could only visualize something better. I have a client who was the top sales person in his company. He was making a good income based on commissions, more than any other sales person had ever earned. One day this sales person asked himself why he didn’t sell more and visualized himself selling at a pace twice what he had done the previous year. He pondered what effort would be necessary, thought about where the sales might be found, and visualized himself achieving that new level of success. During the next year he doubled his sales. Having reached that level of success, he again visualized himself increasing his sales by fifty percent. The following year he did just that.
There is only one thing that limits our success in sales and that is our ability to visualize our success, combined with the effort to make it happen. Spend time daydreaming and visualizing your sales success, looking far beyond your current levels. Increases can be achieved if you use the right process and the first phase of that process is visualization.
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