Everyone, at some point in their sales career, hits a slump. This guest post is the story of how one sales person got into, and out of, a slump.  

Oh, The Places You’ll Go! the book containing the above words of wisdom, is a favorite in my house.  We read it once a week, and I work hard to impart the wisdom to my children. Strength of character, grit, positive attitude, and most importantly, we make our own way in the world through choices.  

Those traits are a lot of the things that make me successful in sales also.  

But sometimes, I miss the point for myself.  I get slumped.

The slump usually comes on slowly, insidiously, creeping into life in the form of excuses, apathy and burgeoning responsibilities not associated with helping clients.  

First, it’s a missed personal sales goal(s), “I have so many things going on, I just need to re-evaluate.”

Then, a missed quota (for the first time ever) “Meh, our product is behind the times, how do they expect me to sell so much?”

Wow, missed quota for the third straight quarter!  “Well, we need new sales tools, our product sucks, management forced a new sales process on me and increased quota!  I hate my job!!”

No grit, lack of sales character and the choice to blame others for why clients aren’t getting results.  Sure signs of a slump.

So I called Carole.  If you have experience with her, you can guess what she told me.  Pretty similar to what Dr. Suess tells the kids in the book, but with less rhyming.  Here I paraphrase, but faithfully so, “Only you can un-slump yourself, but it’s not easily done.  Strength of character, grit, positive attitude and the choice to not be in a slump.” 

The weird part, I wasn’t even a coaching client.  Carole helped me in a single conversation undo a whole year worth of bad results and poor decisions.

“Un-slumping” may not be easily done, and sometimes it takes someone from the outside to remind me that I can wait for things to happen, or I can go out and make things happen for my clients.  When I make things happen for clients, good stuff happens for me.