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All businesses are built on two areas of competency – people skills and marketing skills. Many sales people who are more than adequate in their sales and people skills are struggling today. The reason is most sales people lack enough opportunities with customers. Lead generation = dollar creation

As a sales person you are in business for yourself. Having a mentality of being the CEO of your company is crucial to developing your business. The dealership signs your check, and you fill in the numbers.

You have a better opportunity than ever to be successful. The key to your long-term success as a sales person is the creation of a dynamite marketing strategy that dealers overlook and most sales people are too lazy to do.

Your first step is to create a marketing web. Take a sheet of paper and list every way that you receive customers. The first two ways you probably listed were from walk-ins and phone prospects. These are produced by the dealership and are therefore the ones over which you have no control. Begin to control your destiny and think of ways to produce customers from other resources.

What other sources of leads did you list? Here are some suggestions: referrals, service drive, service tickets, be-backs, affiliations, repeats, targeted phone calling, database marketing, targeted list mailings, orphan owners, lost customer marketing, coupon swaps, joint-venture advertising, community board flyer, door-to-door flyers, Web site and many more.

For each source at least one strategy of creating leads should be chosen. If you execute one strategy a day on 10 ways to create leads, your leads will grow exponentially over time. Your business will hit a period of critical mass and explode.

At that point, a sales person has the best job in the dealership. Your pay, hours, stress and job security will be better than the managers’. Your risk will be zero, your investment minimal and most everything is supplied for you.

Why don’t more sales people take this road of action to success? Usually, it’s a lack of buy-in. If you haven’t begun to create a business of your own, it’s because your belief system doesn’t buy into the idea of a self-created destiny in sales. Either you have “Manageritis”, don’t believe you will be selling vehicles for a career, don’t believe you will be at your current dealership in the future, don’t believe it can be done or you’re lazy. The truth sucks sometimes.

Success and failure are all about belief systems and habits. You have to believe and live it everyday for it to work. Speaker and business philosopher Jim Rohn once was asked if you had to take successful actions everyday to be successful and he replied, “Only on the days you want to be successful.” Actually, if you only take successful actions every once in a while, you can’t even be successful on those once-in-a-while days. It takes sustained effort.

If you begin to execute a strategy of marketing and don’t have immediate success, you can’t quit. It’s easier to say something doesn’t work than it is to use the lack of success as a path to figuring out successful actions. Marketing in itself is a series of miscalculations to figure out what works. The greatest marketers of all time have failed more than they have been right. To great marketers, all failures are just tests on the road to figuring out the right formula.

As a small marketer in the Internet age, you can appear to be bigger and more successful than you really are. You can create a successful brand. You can be more agile and target more than larger businesses such as dealerships can do with traditional advertising. The over-hyped, over-competitive marketplace is perfect for the dedicated and creative sales person of today.