High school, a college certificate, a master’s degree or PhD will certainly get you far in life and provide a solid foundation for a career. But ongoing self-education is as important as a formal education and tends to be overlooked, especially in sales management.
Just like doctors continuously update their skills and keep up with medical technology to provide the best care for their patients, so salespeople need to stay sharp and on top of the latest information to stay ahead in their sales careers.
You may believe you have seen and heard it all, but the biggest mistake is to think you already know enough. When was the last time you had a good hard look at your marketing strategy? What have you been doing to improve your overall sales management efforts? Or are you one of those salespeople stuck on what you learnt years ago, because “that’s what always worked”.
When it comes to your sales numbers, you can only achieve better results when you’re actively raising your standards in the areas that matter the most. Your success can be determined by how much you’re willing to learn and improve and then raising your old standards to the new one.
The top performers and businesses are the ones that never truly stop learning, adopting a lifelong student mindset. As Socrates said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing” – in other words, always be ready to learn something new. At first you might feel like this is way more challenging than you thought it would be, almost like altering your DNA in this great pursuit of knowledge, but it soon becomes a habit, and this mindset will become second-nature to you.
Even when you’ve already achieved great results, you can always look at the numbers and figure out ways of keeping those results consistent and sustainable for as long as possible. You don’t have to go back to college, but you can use 30 minutes every week to study new trends. This could be staying up to date with the latest news on sales management and current marketing trends, or investigating how to better utilise AI in your strategies. The aim is to improve your knowledge across all your areas of expertise.
With all being said, it doesn’t matter what kind of formal education you’ve got under your belt, the most important thing is that you’re consistently and continuously self-educating to become the best at what you do and maintain it for as long as you can. Some of the most successful people in sales management have never had any formal education in the field but have always seen great success because they are prepared to learn.
For you to become just as successful as the biggest names in the game, you must make use of every available resource, utilise every tool at your disposal and when you need a helping hand, contact us. Because then, where others fall short of greatness, you’ll be holding it in the palm of your hands.
