By Todd Duncan

Hyping, in the most basic terms, is relying solely on external stimuli—success books, cassettes, videos, seminars, and the like—to gain energy and maintain enthusiasm to sell. It’s the equivalent of eating a Baby Ruth candy bar to sustain your energy for an entire week. It usually works in the short term, while the sugar is running through your veins, but it never lasts. Before long, you’re back to where you started: tired, hungry, and in need of energy. And the same is true in the sales profession. The only difference in the world of sales is that the “Baby Ruths” are bound, audible, and often come with a name badge and a ticket.

Don’t get me wrong here; success merchandise isn’t the problem. The root of hyping lies in the false belief that any form of external stimulation can alone truly sustain your motivation to sell successfully. It simply can’t and won’t. Like sugar in your veins, it may give you a little pick-me-up for a short period of time, but before long you’ll be left to fend for yourself.

IT ALL STARTS WITH A MOTIVE

Listen in on any criminal trial and you’ll most likely hear one word repeated more than any other. In the widely publicized criminal trial of O. J. Simpson, this particular word was mentioned 226 times in the opening and closing arguments alone. “What’s the word?” you ask. Motive.

Motive is at the heart of any action— good or bad. Because motive leads to action.

In the sales profession, you can’t ignore your core motive for selling, then rely solely on hype to sustain your enthusiasm to sell. When you do, your enthusiasm will simply be based on emotional highs and lows, on how you feel that day or in that particular moment. And that will make it very difficult to sustain momentum.

Trying to sustain your selling energy without tapping into your core motive for selling is like trying to run a marathon on inspiration alone—without food or water. No matter how much adrenaline you have as the starting pistol sounds, when your body is depleted of nutrients, no amount of inspiration will give your muscles the energy they need to keep going. And eventually you’ll collapse.

Untapped Motives

As a salesperson, your level of enthusiasm depends heavily on your core motives for selling. That’s because motive truly gives birth to action. External stimulation (books, tapes, seminars, and so forth) is supposed to be a catalyst that taps into your existing motives for the purpose of initiating consistent, motive-centered action. But external stimulation alone is not the true mother of action. And as a result, it will never sustain your enthusiasm in the long term. Maybe you can relate.

UNCOVERING YOUR TRUE MOTIVES

The bottom line is that true, sustainable enthusiasm in sales begins when you understand your core motives for selling. Unfortunately that’s where too many salespeople go wrong. Either they don’t understand their core selling motives, or they mistake money and materialism for motives. And those mistakes lead to an emotional roller coaster of a career while they leave discerning customers with a bad taste in their mouths.

In order to break free from a hyping habit, you must leverage your core motives for selling. You must look deep inside yourself and answer the question of why: Why, above every other reason, do I want to succeed in sales?

And if your answer is something that can be measured externally (for example, money, position, status), you will continually have trouble remaining motivated to sell—especially when difficulties arise.

That’s because how you sell (your action) is linked to why you sell (your motive), whether you know it or not.

Hyping goes away when real motives come into focus.

You need to look closely and determine what makes you passionate about being a salesperson. Then you need to add your core motive(s) to your equation for success so that you no longer invest your hard-earned dollars and precious time on things that just add up to a lot of disappointing hype in the end. When you can do that, you’ll be on the right path to a long-lasting, highly exhilarat­ing career in sales. That’s because all true sales success begins when you consistently tap into your core motives.

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