Are most people willing to do the hard work first it takes to make selling easy?
Jeffrey Gitomer has this wonderful saying, “Most salespeople will not do the hard work necessary it takes to make selling easy.”
He’s right. Selling can be easy, but you have to put in the hard work upfront to get to the easy part. You have to make yourself an authority on your subject. You have to become the perceived expert in your space. You have to create content and share it with your market to position yourself and your company accordingly. Few people seem willing to do this hard work first. Or, perhaps they put in some in the beginning, only to peter out after a few months. You must stay in it for the long-haul. This is never a one-and-done deal.
Let’s take a look at writing. Most people hate to write. It’s a strange deal: professionals have to write for a living, at their job, writing emails, documents, proposals and presentations, yet they say they hate writing. You’ll never be any good at something if you keep telling yourself and others that you hate it.
Expert salespeople like Gitomer state that writing has set them free. He says writing is the source of all of his wealth because so much good has come from his waking up and writing, from the discipline of getting after it each morning.
The act of writing for Gitomer has turned into weekly columns in business journals, positioning himself and his business as the go-to experts in sales training. His weekly columns have turned into published books, further cementing Gitomer and his brand as an authority while also building his legacy. Writing has positioned him as a nationwide authority in his email that goes out to 200,000+ people each week without fail. Writing has earned him speaking engagements throughout the world, getting paid well to share his messages with various audiences. All of these wonderful things — these business assets — stem from writing.
Writing is a big part of the hard work it takes to make selling easy. If you’re not willing to put in the hard work of writing in sales, you may want to look elsewhere for a career. Both sales & writing are not for the faint of heart.
Remember: people don’t want to write. What they want is to have written. They want the bragging rights of telling others that they’re a writer or an author. They don’t want to actually do the work. That’s far too hard. According to them, that requires WAY too much discipline to do, like a crazy, Navy SEAL amount of discipline that only the lucky few possess.
What most people want is the credential without the work. They want the status badge to brag to their friends on social. They want what’s hard without doing the hard work first. This is why business advice like Gitomer’s above is so great: because very few are actually willing to do it, to act on it, to get after it, to make it happen.
Yet writing is like any other discipline: The more you do it, the better you get at it. Just like the more time you spend in the gym, the bigger your muscles get; the more you train your mind through writing and reading, the sharper it gets. But, like the gym, you gotta put in the work — every day. There is no day off. Like they say in SEAL Teams: every day is a Monday. If you’re dedicated and you love it, there’s never a need to take a day off.
And strangely, wonderfully, when you get to this state of dedication, of living it, of loving it, you never need a vacation. As Gitomer says, When you love what you do, every day is a vacation day. Few will get there, but for those who do, they realize it is the truth.
