The quote in the subject line comes from the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi.
Over the 5 years of this blog’s existence, I have tried to avoid motivational type of content or content focused on the intangibles. Not on moral grounds or anything like that…it’s just not something I am good at writing about. (On a side note, one piece of motivational content that has stuck with me over the years was a post from Dan Waldschmidt on Olympian Derek Redmond who limped across the finish line with his father in the Olympics.) I ended up writing this post because like a lot of people in the blogosphere, I find my writing inspiration by things that happen to me in my day-to-day life. This is one of those posts.
Enthusiasm and Passion
First, a confession: I am a passionate and enthusiastic guy but I am also prone to ups-and-downs. My mind is all over the place and thinking about something else. If something is on my mind, I may have trouble dropping it and that can lend itself to some seriously bad phone calls, meetings, etc. In other words, I have written this blog post as content for my readers and a reminder to myself.
Your prospects feed off you energy or said another way, prospects can tell when you don’t have passion. Please don’t let the following criticism happen to you:
Getting a product demo and the dude is just reading off a script. Come on man, work on your game.
— Chris Lloyd (@lloyder2020) August 16, 2013
Ok-ok, lets stay positive. Here are some stories of enthusiasm that helped inspire this post:
We did a call this week with Dave Stein of ESR Research. He wasn’t selling anything, but from the minute he told us how he was doing – the enthusiasm and excitement from his voice just reached out over the phone and grabbed us. It made the conversation fun and engaging. Someone you WANT to talk to. Afterwards, we debriefed on the call and marveled at his energy. I was thinking about this post at the time and our interaction with Dave inspired me into action.
My buddy Ted Purcell is the SVP of Worldwide Sales at Clarizen. I have known him for 20 years and he has always been one of the best sales people I have known. He has sold everything from defect tracking tools to global rollouts of SAP and while I don’t have proof, he may have sold girl scout cookies and the Brooklyn Bridge. One of his main attributes is he brings unbelievable enthusiasm and passion to every conversation he is involved in. I swear at the end of every conversation with Ted, the person walks away energized, excited, impressed, and motivated.
That’s the word I have been looking for – motivated. Motivating the prospect is the result of your enthusiasm. In only a rare, select few cases, a product sells itself. In other cases, our role as sales people is 
to help motivate prospects into customers. Yes, of course there are other fundamentals and tactics you must bring to the table. But one of the keys is to success is to express our passion and excitement about what we represent and how it can help our prospects. They can feel this passion and it helps inspire them to keep moving forward.
What’s the point? In the world of new ideas in selling: social selling, sales 2.0, innovative sales process, etc., we forget some of the core, primal reasons that make sales people successful. We have to bring it every call. If we can’t get jacked about what we are talking about, how the hell are our prospects going to?
So get your game face on before that next sales call.
That is all. Now break!
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic and a co-founder of Topo. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter