In all of my life, from a child until now, I have always noticed that there are two types of successful people. There are those people who get successful to the success of everyone around them, and those that get successful to the detriment of everyone around them. The question therein lies, do you climb over the bodies to get to where you want to go, or do you try and build everyone up around you and hope that someone notices…

I believe strongly in the latter – in my opinion, what’s the point of being successful if you don’t get to share it with anyone. You need people to high five on the way up because they’re the people that will help you when things aren’t going so well. When you’ve climbed over bodies to get to the top, the way down is usually not so friendly – people will welcome your demise.

The fact of the matter is, if you do something great and don’t tell people, quite often someone else will take credit for it. If credit is available, it will get taken. This is how people can get up to the detriment of those around them. I am very vocal about my wins, and I am very vocal about the wins of the people in my team. It gives me as much satisfaction to brag about a colleague’s success as it does to brag about my own. That’s the whole idea of a team, isn’t it?

I guess the point of this entry was that you should always celebrate successes, and create a culture of celebrating them. This should help stir on more wins. People who climb over the bodies on the path to success are often known for it within an organisation or a university – I reckon this is where the saying ‘it gets pretty lonely at the top’ must come from. When I get to the top I want all of my colleagues there with me… Then we can have an awesome party!

Isn’t it funny how different stigma’s and stereotypes are attached to different professions. I am in the sales profession, which has a large number of negative connotations associated with it – however I am in a ‘corporate sales/technical sales role,’ which pushes me up the ‘socially acceptable’ ladder a bit against say a ‘used car salesman’ or ‘real estate agent’ as these professions drip with stereotypes.

The fact of the matter is that the most respected titles in business, General Manager, CEO and Managing Director are the biggest sales professions in the industry – they should be taking any and every opportunity to sell their company. Yet they own the company, have a great ‘title’ and therefore are not seen by society as a sales person.

To put things into perspective, when was the first time you tried to sell? Was it trying to convince your mum to buy you a chocolate bar in a shopping centre? Was it trying to court a girl in high school? Was it trying to convince your university lecturer that the big clock in the building is fast and you really are handing your assignment in on time? If you ever try to convince someone of something, you are trying to sell them to your way of thinking.

So next time you think poorly of a sales person, consider what you do? Consider whether better sales skills would you help your kids to eat their vegetables at night, or convince your patient in the hospital to take their meds without complaining. Whether you are an academic, a technician, a builder or an engineer – everyone sells. So how are your sales skills?

People get busy. I get busy. What I question are the fruits of that busyness. It is very common to see people frantically running around the office, continually complaining about how busy they are, yet seeing limited results. The scary thing is that it is these busy people who are often too busy to make sales calls or too busy to do a follow up. In essence they are too busy to bring in any business.

To compound the issue it is also common for people to make excuses for busy people. “I can see why they’ve struggled with sales this month, they’ve been so busy.” – That doesn’t make any sense…

If there is a genuine capacity issue at your office then put forward a case to hire someone else, however if you really look at where your time is spent you may realize that you spend 20% of time on the activities that bring in business and 80% of your time on being busy.

This is also relevant to companies – sometimes its not the fault of the sales person and they can spend 80% of their time being busy (and not making sales) because they are expected to. Mixed focus tasks and overly heavy administrative duties can give people an excuse to be busy when the,’ why aren’t you performing question comes up?’

So consider your core tasks and what it is that you do to bring business in the door. Don’t let busyness stand in the way of business.

Creativity is my favourite characteristic in a person. Think about the most creative people you know. I’m sure that you are currently thinking of musicians, artists, engineers etc… However if you really think about it creativity is a characteristic that propels businesses forward.

It’s creative people who build better processes, it’s creative people who question the status quo and look to improve structure, it’s the creative people who can often inspire the people around them. Creativity is the root of innovation. Innovation is a word that is much more synonymous with business.

If you look at all of the entrepreneurs in the world, they have created a way to deliver a product or service better than anyone else in the world. They have had self belief and enough confidence to propel their companies in to the stratosphere.

When we look at these geniuses, like the Google guys, they are not “typical” business people, but if you look at all of the most successful people, they aren’t “typical” business people. They are creative people who can create a vision and get everyone excited about it, or create the ladder and get everyone else to climb it.

So next time you are considering applying for a promotion or looking at a job that’s another rung up the ladder, think about the person who created that ladder. Is that something you can do? Remember, we can’t all be Managing Directors of big successful companies, but if that’s what we want – we sure as hell can try!