When you look through the latest issue of Personal Selling Power, you’ll notice that the magazine is organized into three sections: knowledge, skills and motivation. All three key factors are critical for competing successfully and maintaining sales success.

Knowledge. To make buying decisions, today’s customers demand more detailed information. Salespeople need to know more than raw data, they must know where to obtain the right information and deliver the information to the customer in the shortest, most comprehensive and most compelling way. The two most critical challenges in managing sales knowledge are: (1) keeping up-to-date with the latest information that is important to the customer and (2) keeping up-to-date with sales automation tools designed to speed up the communication process with the customer.

In order to keep up with rapid changes in the field, we have no choice but to aggressively exploit technology so we can manage information faster and better.

Personal Selling Power addresses these issues on an ongoing basis.

Skills. Research has proven that good selling skills are the result of ongoing learning, coaching and practice. While salespeople often claim to have many years of experience in selling, upon closer examination, their level of skills is often nothing more than one year’s worth of experience repeated over and over. Effective sales managers continually train and rehearse their salespeople’s skills to avoid lost sales. All sales superstars study, practice and polish their skills.

Take Zig Ziglar for example. Last week I visited with him right after he gave a two-hour presentation to a record breaking audience of 16,500 in Dallas, Texas. In an interview following his performance he told me that although he had given the same presentation a week earlier in Houston, he spent four hours studying and practicing his speech before appearing in Dallas. Why? Because when he gives a performance, he gives it his 100 percent best effort. The same applies to our sales performance. If we stop practicing, we lose our winning edge and soon our performance will drop. If we run only at 80 percent of our capabilities, we will lose 20 percent of our sales opportunities.

Motivation. Without motivation, even the most knowledgeable or skilled salesperson can’t win. A well motivated salesperson will develop positive qualities like enthusiasm, confidence, persistence, determination and discipline. These qualities are easy to identify, but tough to maintain over a long period of time. What makes motivation so challenging is that salespeople are often unaware of their own motivational difficulties. They often say that they are doing great when they actually could benefit from an encouraging talk, or a pat on the back. A salesperson’s motivation is like a plant in a garden. The plant has roots that can’t be seen; they represent the salesperson’s past which can’t be changed.

Over a long period of time, the sales manager can help the salesperson create stronger roots (a stronger sense of identity). As the stem of a plant moves towards the sunlight, salespeople move towards challenging goals and attractive rewards. The sales manager has to help salespeople reach those goals and provide appropriate rewards. And just as most plants have the capacity to bloom, most salespeople have the capacity to reach profitable levels of success. Personal Selling Power’s role is to create the optimum motivational climate that encourages you and your sales team to expand your knowledge and develop new skills so you and your company can continue to profit from the best opportunities available in today’s market.