SalesMotivation.net

by Joe Calloway

“Showing off” isn’t about bragging or arrogance. Showing off means bringing your best to any situation. Showing off means creating value through getting it done.

Here are 6 tips for achieving “showing off” status:

1. Be All About Results
In Texas, if you can’t deliver results, they say you’re “all hat and no cattle.” Big ideas are a dime a dozen. An employer will trade ten “idea guys” for one person who can get things done. Don’t tell me what you’re going to do. Do it. Then tell me you did it.
Vision without execution is a hallucination.

2. Don’t Make Stupid Promises
Many a career has been killed by stupid promises. Never over-promise. Never, ever, ever over-promise. As tempting as it may be to tell an angry customer or a frustrated co-worker or an impatient boss that you’ll get them what they want on time – if you know you can’t do it – don’t promise it. It’s much easier to defend not being able to do something than it is to promise and then not deliver. Know what results you can deliver and then deliver them consistently.

3. Be Willing To Risk
Casey Stengel once said, “They say you can’t do it but that doesn’t always work.” He’s right. Here’s another blinding flash of the obvious: 100% of the things you don’t try won’t happen. The lesson is this: take a chance.

If you claim to be an innovator, then, by definition, you are a risk taker. Innovation means you go first. Innovation means that you will try ideas before you know that they’re going to work. That’s the very nature of innovation. If you wait until success is certain, then you’re too late.

4. Get Back Inside The Box
Everyone talks about thinking “outside the box.” Here’s another approach – get back inside the box and get better at what you’re already doing. If you can significantly improve on what you, or your company, is already doing, it might beat the pants off of thinking “outside the box” and trying to reinvent the wheel.

Sometimes our greatest returns are realized when we invest in improving on our customers’ (be they internal or external) basic expectations. If you own a hamburger stand, rather than pursue outside the box innovations like adding tanning beds to your business or inventing a chocolate flavored hamburger, you might do well to simply be better at serving the hamburgers while they’re still hot. Get back inside the box and get better at the basics.

5. What Have You Done For Me Next? Speed Wins.
So you’ll get back with me tomorrow? Great. That gives me lots of time to find somebody else to do business with because you’re fired. Believe it or not, I still run into people who take great chest-swelling pride in their policy of returning calls within twenty-four hours. Wake up and smell the millennium, folks. It’s the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. While you’re looking at your calendar to find a time to get back to your customers, they’re looking at their watches.

6. Whatever Happens Is Normal
Here’s a test: What’s going to happen next? As Mark Twain said, “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don’t know.” Good answer. If you want to knock the blocks out from under someone’s sense of well-being, just throw a little uncertainty at them. We hate not knowing what’s going to happen next. Well, guess what. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. No one does. That information is not available. The question is can you be ok with that? The person who handles the unexpected has made it up that whatever happens is normal. Not acceptable, necessarily, but normal.

About the Author

Joe Calloway is the author of Work Like You’re Showing Off! The Joy, Jazz, And Kick Of Being Better Tomorrow Than You Were Today For more information, or to order, go to JoeCalloway.com