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Warren Wechsler's
Top Story

Being Up in a Down Market

Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Some restrictions apply to the use and distribution of this information. For more valuable materials, visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com. All materials and content © Warren Wechsler, 2001 – All rights reserved.

I've been talking to a lot of people these days in my travels about the state of the economy. I overhear people talking about how business is slow and things aren't as good as they used to be during the "go-go" years, which for us were probably 1998, most of 1999, and the early part of 2000. That was when the NASDAQ was at 5,000; now it's under 2,000. It was when dot-coms seemed to be the rage; now they're all out of business. And I notice that people tend to have what I would call a self-fulfilling prophecy. When things are going bad in the economy, somehow we all think that our businesses are all going down the tubes as well. That's not true. That's not true at all.

In fact, today's top story is called "Being up in a Down Market." How do you maintain being up as a salesperson when everybody else is telling you the sky is falling? Well, let me tell you, the sky is not falling. There are many things that we can do as sales professionals to be successful in an up market, in a down market. It really doesn't matter in my view what's going on in the marketplace. We can sell ourselves to the top in any economy. If you're looking for ideas on how you can do that, you'll want to stay tuned after the break.

I was listening to Public Radio when I was going out of town about five or ten days ago. Steve Forbes was the guest at the Silicon Valley, California Club. I can't remember what they call it now. It's on Public Radio, and people from all over the country appear on a forum and are able to give their views. And there are questions and answers afterwards. Commonwealth Club. The Commonwealth Club of California. I knew if I filled up enough air it would come to me. Steve Forbes was there, and as you can imagine, people in Silicon Valley are really depressed and saddened by what's going on out there. They invited Steve Forbes to come out and give some perspective.

Now, Steve Forbes is the son of Malcolm Forbes who was the founder of Forbes Magazine. Steve Forbes is a genius in his own right. He was the editor of that magazine for a long time. As you may know, he was a presidential candidate in the last election, and I believe the election campaign before that. So he's run for President twice that I know of.

He brought a tremendous amount of historical perspective to what's happening with this "bust" that we're experiencing, this downturn in the economy. He talked about some recent history. For example, in the 1980's there were a couple of industries that were really in the tank. They were the oil business. That was when you could buy Rolex watches in Dallas on street corners. Building had stopped. Houston had all these empty office buildings. At the same time, there was a real estate crunch after the tax reform act of 1986. And real estate was really in the toilet. So you had energy and real estate, two major parts of our national economy, in the tank. And in spite of that, during that decade of the eighties, our economy grew at a very healthy rate.

We have a tendency now to look on the bad side, especially salespeople. If you do ten things really well and one thing bad…I'll tell you, I've been in a lot of rooms with a lot of sales people, and people like us in sales tend to focus on the negative. I don't know why it is. Maybe we're just waiting for rejection. We know it's coming, so we focus on it anyway. I don't know.

Anyway, Steve Forbes was saying that, interestingly enough, all the Chicken Littles…Chicken Little was the one who said, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" in the children's story. In Silicon Valley they were saying, "Oh my goodness! We only put $10 billion of investment capitol into the dot-com Internet related business in the year 2000. Oh woe is us!" Well, there is good news and bad news. That is true that in the year before, in 1999 $100 billion went into Internet related and dot-com enterprises. But before that, in the decade previous to 1999, a total of $10 billion was all that was ever invested. What am I saying? I'm saying that in the year 2000 the same amount of money was invested in Silicon Valley that had been invested in the decade before if you just throw out the year 1999. So what he's saying, and what I'm saying is yes, the dot-com economy might be not what it was, and it's obvious that it's not. But that's only a small part of our overall economy.

It is so true that we can sell in any market. If you believe in your product and you believe in your service, you can actually build market share at the expense of your competitors during a downturn in the marketplace.

So let's get straight on a couple of things. The sky is not falling. The world as we know it is not coming to an end. You don't have to get out your survivalist kits because what we're going through is just a business cycle. There are highs and lows in every business cycle. We happen to be in a low right now. But in spite of that we still have the most robust economy in the world. And there are so many opportunities for us as salespeople to go out there and be successful even in this market.

How do you do it? First let me say the reason it's a great time to build market share is that so many of our competitors are hiding under a rock. They're afraid to go out there and make calls, to do that ground work that it takes to build a business.

This was a partial transcript from Warren Wechsler's weekly radio show. Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com Also, listen to Warren's weekly radio broadcast Wednesday's at 4:05 - 5:00 pm Central time, on KMCD-AM 1570AM. Shows are broadcast live on the internet at http://www.warpradio.com/asx/KMCD-AM.asx