To repeat what was said in the beginning, the PerfectCoaches process is built for you and belongs to you. You perfect the process by using it to grow and succeed. Hence the final rule of three is termed GPS, the acronym for Grow, Perfect, Succeed.
Most people use their GPS to get places in their car. Wouldn't life be great if it was as simple as telling your GPS where you want to go, not in your car, but in your life and career, and have a voice tell you exactly, step-by step, how to get there? You would get all the direction you need. Life's not that simple. Individuals must make the decisions that get them to their life's destination whether personal or professional. Yes, we can get advice, ideas, helpful thoughts from those around us but, at the end of the day, the decisions on what, when, where, why we need to do something has to come from within. That's where PerfectCoaches comes in.
Leaders and sales professionals should also have a syllabus for lifelong learning that enables them to know the greats like Sam Walton or great ideas, like those in Og Mandino’s book The World’s Greatest Salesman. The PerfectCoaches thought experiment invites you to imagine working with them as your coach.
Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was one of the great leaders in the history of retail. He famously said, There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
Walton’s biography is a story about leadership in business. Born in Kingfisher Oklahoma in 1918, he used a $25,000 loan from his father, a bank president, to open his first Ben Franklin store. Frustrated by the fact that Ben Franklin management did not want to pursue the rural market as aggressively as Walton wanted to, he founded his first Wal-Mart store in 1962.
Walton’s deep understanding of the rural retail market was one of the keys to his success. He understood his customers, and learned even more when he personally played the role of greeter in his stores. In the half century since, Walmart has grown to dominate the marketplace by building upon Walton’s insight that people want the most variety and best quality at the best price.
Inside Walmart’s price-driven business model, it is a challenge to also offer good customer service. Still, you know you have excelled when customers come back. Keeping customers spending their money with your business—let’s call it the Sam Walton Test—is a test that every persuasion professional must pass every day.
Every interaction with a customer is ultimately about one behavior you are trying to influence, namely, keeping that person’s business. Every customer-facing employee is in the persuasion business, because it is their job to influence the customer to buy today and return to buy again.
Indeed, the ubiquitous nature of the “Sam Walton Test,” or “Sam Walton Imperative,” is what makes it crucial for every business to have its customer-facing staff acquire the building block skills and best practices of Persuasion Professionals.
Alongside the accomplishments of people like Sam Walton, you can consider the writings of Og Mandino. Although Augustine "Og" Mandino is not particularly well known outside of the world of sales and motivational writing, his bestselling book The Greatest Salesman in the World. Is regarded as a classic, and his books have sold over 50 million copies.
Drawing on his own experience with disappointment and the need to persist, he addressed a life in sales, and life in general, in an almost spiritual sense. The Greatest Salesman in the World opens with the words “I will persist until I succeed.” The following quotes explain the challenges of selling.
The career I have chosen is laden with opportunity yet it is fraught with heartbreak and despair and the bodies of those who have failed, were they piled one atop another, would cast its shadow down upon all the pyramids of the earth.
Never has there been a map, however carefully executed to detail and scale, which carried its owner over even one inch of ground… Action, alone, is the tinder which ignites the map… my dreams, my plans, my goals, into a living force. Action is the food and drink which will nourish my success. I will act now.
His ideas are organized around what he called the Ten Scrolls, several of which are consistent with the PerfectCoaches concept. Of specific interest is The Scroll Marked VIII: Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold. Here Mandino writes:
I will be as my own prophet and though all may laugh at my utterances they will hear my plans, they will know my dreams; and thus there will be no escape for me until my words become accomplished deeds. Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold.
Spoiler alert, the greatest salesman in the world turns out to be Paul of Tarsus, that is, Saint Paul of the Christian New Testament.
