Performance in any endeavor starts with a dream of successful accomplishment. Scientist/philosopher Buckminster Fuller said that people can accomplish anything they can imagine; but first they must have the courage and confidence to believe in their imaginations and to dream. Walt Disney put it another way: “If you can dream it, you can do it.”11 We translate our dreams into objectives and goals, and these objectives and goals are born in our minds as the result of the interaction of our mental attitudes.
You might think that performance comes about as the result of attitudes; but to the contrary, we tend to form attitudes because of how well we do things, because of our actions. Research has indicated that performance, which is a series of successful behaviors, often precedes attitudes. In other words, if we do something well, we tend to have a favorable attitude toward it. For example, if you are successful at a job, you are likely to have a favorable attitude about the company for which you work. In contrast, having a positive attitude about your company does not necessarily mean you will perform any better, because what determines job performance is mostly your internal drive or motivation to perform well, not external factors such as a pleasant work environment or company picnics.
Attitudes represent the mind portion of job performance and, more importantly, performance in selling. Attitudes can be useful in helping salespeople perform better because they can be changed, controlled, and directed from counterproductive attitudes to productive, objective‐oriented ones to help improve performance. Thus, your actions can lead to a feeling of success, which, in turn, leads to a positive attitude.
I include attributes in this section about attitudes. Attributes are somewhat like attitudes in that attributes also have a significant impact on job performance. Attributes are inherent talents, characteristics, or qualities of a person. You are born with attributes, but you develop attitudes as you experience life. You can change attitudes, but you can only improve or enhance your attributes, you cannot change them. For the purpose of this book, we are combining the concepts of attitudes and attributes into one broad concept – attitude – to avoid confusion and so that the AESKOPP mnemonic is no longer than seven letters.
Attitude control and enhancement in sports is an obvious example of the importance of mental attitude. Experts estimate that sports performance is determined by about 75 percent inherent ability and about 25 percent attitude, with ability consisting of such inherent elements as size, speed, coordination, quickness, and endurance. Attitude is the head (or mind) portion of sports performance. Sales performance is also determined by ability and attitude, but, unlike sports, is split equally between the two.
While skills and knowledge are vital in selling, the following attitudes from the core competencies listed in Exhibit 4.1 are even more important. Successful media selling requires you to be the following:
Honest
Honest is technically not an attitude, it is an attribute – it means behaving with integrity and in an ethical, straightforward, morally upright, and truthful way. You trust honest people and feel that their word is their bond. Because so much media business is conducted by verbal agreements and not by signed contracts or insertion orders (IOs) (contracts sometimes do not get signed for weeks or months after an advertising campaign has started), being honest in media selling is of primary importance, which is why it is listed first.
Positive/optimistic
You cannot sell successfully if you do not have a positive outlook on life and, thus, have an optimistic attitude. An example of a positive attitude is Albert Einstein’s comment that, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity”12 – the glass‐is‐half‐full attitude (instead of half‐empty). On the other hand, negative people are downers, to themselves and others. Optimism is also directly related to self‐esteem and confidence. People with high self‐esteem and confidence believe they can affect the future and make things come out right. As Helen Keller said, “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”13
Committed
Committed means you have absolutely no doubts and will give everything in support of an undertaking or a cause without turning back. As Myer Berlow, former President of AOL Interactive Marketing, says: “When you’re eating ham and eggs for breakfast, the chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.”14 Generals have been known to burn bridges behind their troops to make retreat impossible and, thus, forced their soldiers to be totally committed and to fight for their lives.
Another dimension of commitment is passion for the cause and the task. Louis Gerstner, ex‐CEO of IBM in his book, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, which describes his incredible turnaround of IBM, wrote that “personal leadership is about passion.”15 He means a passion for or commitment to winning. Being committed also means that people accept responsibility and hold themselves accountable for their successes and failures.
Confident
Feeling confident is vital in selling. Without confidence, or belief, in yourself, your product, and your offer, you cannot generate the enthusiasm required to reflect a positive image of your product to buyers. All training, all knowledge acquisition, all practice, all planning should be aimed at one thing – making you feel more confident about what you are selling.
Courageous
Being courageous is a vital attribute for salespeople. Courageous does not mean you have no fear, it means you have the ability to overcome fear. You need courage to stand up to managers and others who might pressure you to do the wrong thing or to be dishonest. You need courage to set out every day to make 10 calls when you know you will probably face 10 rejections. You need courage to tell your boss the bad news that you did not get an order on a piece of business you had been working on for months. You need courage to be honest and tell the truth to your customers and to your management.
Competitive
Being competitive means having a strong desire to win. However, the drive and passion for winning must be channeled into two areas: being self‐competitive and being externally competitive. When you are self‐competitive, you compete with yourself, pushing yourself to improve. In Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, Louis Gerstner refers to this self‐competitiveness as “restless self‐renewal,” or the motivation to constantly improve.16 Self‐competition is a prerequisite for improvement, which the Japanese call kaizen, meaning constant improvement in small increments, leading to huge improvements in the long run, as Toyota practiced religiously on the way to becoming the world’s largest car maker.
Being externally competitive means having a strong desire to beat the competition, those direct competitors in your medium and competitive media. If you are a television station salesperson, you want to beat the salespeople from other television stations to get higher shares of business and get higher rates, while pulling advertising dollars away from websites and Internet platforms, newspapers, radio, and outdoor. Being externally competitive means winning by playing the game fairly and by the rules and not becoming overly competitive either within or out of your own company, which can lead to dishonest and unethical behavior, as described in Chapter 3. This attitude is probably better described as being