As a sales and marketing professional, you’re probably constantly looking for just the right ingredients to achieve success -- but what does this entail? Are there certain components that every salesperson should include in their formula for success? While there’s no magic recipe that works everyone, and every sales rep has their own approach and personality, there are three fundamental ingredients to use as your guide: time, testing, and tenacity.

Before we explain how you can leverage the power of negative thinking, let’s first discuss what it is. There are two views on negative thinking: The first, and probably more common, view of negative thinking is linked to things like depression, complaining, worrying, and stressing about everything. It’s the process of finding the worst in even the best situations. It’s about inaction and fear. The second view, and the one we’d like you to focus on today, is about growth, understanding, and learning. It’s the process of visualizing all the bad things that could happen to you, so you become less afraid of taking action. This second view of negative thinking helped me train and successfully swim across the English Channel as well as start my own business in a recession.

If you always ask for the right next steps, you will always have a more qualified pipeline and a more effective way of managing your time and sales activities.

What does it take to create and present a winning digital solution? What can you do to gain a competitive advantage over the “other guys”?

Why pipeline management? Whether you think you are going to reach your goals or miss your goals, how do you know? Can you identify the path that will, or won’t, lead you to success? To do build and maintain the right pipeline, we have to change. Change the way we prospect, the amount of time we prospect, the way we qualify, present, negotiate and close. One thing is for sure, your sales come from your pipeline. And your current pipeline represents the way you sell. To make your pipeline look better, you will have to change something: your sales tactics, strategies and/or sales habits. Your pipeline will guide you to know how much and how often you need to change.

An alter ego can be viewed as “a second self or different version of oneself” according to Merriam-Webster. In sales, many reps unconsciously craft a sales persona or “alter ego” around familiar tendencies instead of learning how to reinvent themselves to think differently about each new sales opportunity. This results in bad sales habits and misconceptions about the reality of your sales cycle and pipeline. I’ve spent a lot of time asking salespeople why they do what they do. Most sales professionals know what they should be doing and can justify how they spend their time and why they make the choices they do. This is a skill that is extremely valuable in a seller of your product or service, but ironically, it can also have a negative effect if it becomes a habit outside of the sales arena. Take a step back by asking yourself: Am I making exceptions to my own sales rules?