The Life S.A.V.E.R.S. For Salespeople
The Life S.A.V.E.R.S. are simple but profoundly effective daily morning practices to help you plan and live your life on your terms.
Each letter in S.A.V.E.R.S. represents one of the best practices of the most successful salespeople on the planet. And they’re also the same activities that bring new levels of peace, clarity, motivation, and energy to your life. They are:
- S ilence
- A ffirmations
- V isualization
- E xercise
- R eading
- S cribing
These practices are the best possible use of your newfound morning time. They’re customizable to fit you, your life, and your goals. And you can start first thing tomorrow morning.
S is for Silence
Silence, the first practice of the Life S.A.V.E.R.S., is a key habit for salespeople. If you’re surrounded by the endless barrage of phone calls, emails, sales meetings, cold calls, tracking sheets, and pending deals that make up a life in sales, this is your opportunity to STOP and BREATHE!
Many of the most successful people in sales, but also in all professions, are daily practitioners of silence. It’s not surprising that Oprah practices stillness—or that she does nearly all of the other Life S.A.V.E.R.S., too. Musicians Katy Perry and Russell Brand practice TM (transcendental meditation) as do Sheryl Crow and Sir Paul McCartney. Film and television stars Jennifer Aniston, Ellen Degeneres, Cameron Diaz, Clint Eastwood, and Hugh Jackman have all spoken of their daily meditation practice. Even famous billionaires Ray Dalio and Rupert Murdoch have credited their financial success to practicing stillness on a daily basis. You’ll be in good (and quiet) company by doing the same.
In no particular order, here are a few to get you started:
- Meditation
- Prayer
- Reflection
- Deep breathing
- Gratitude
Whichever you choose, be sure you don’t stay in bed for your period of silence, and better still, get out of your bedroom altogether.
A is for Affirmations
Have you ever wondered why some of the top salespeople around you regularly surpass even your best sales month? Or why others selling the same thing can only sell enough to scrape by? Time and time again, it is a salesperson’s mindset that shows up as the driving factor in sales performance.
Science has proven that affirmations—when done correctly—are one of the most effective tools for quickly becoming the person you need to be to achieve everything you want in your life. And yet, affirmations also have a bad rap. Many have tried them only to be disappointed, with little or no results.
Here are simple steps for creating and implementing results-oriented Miracle Morning affirmations
Step #1 The Extraordinary Result You Are Committed to and Why
Examples: I am committed to doubling my income in the next 12 months, from $_______ to $_______, so that I can provide financial security for my family.
Step #2 The Necessary Actions You Are Committed to Taking and When
Examples: To guarantee that I double my income, I am committed to doubling my daily prospecting calls from 20 to 40 calls five days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.—NO MATTER WHAT.
Step #3 Recite Your Affirmations Every Morning with Emotion
Schedule time each day to read your affirmations in the morning (ideally during your Miracle Morning), to both program your subconscious and focus your conscious mind on what’s most important to you and what you are committed to doing to make it your reality.
Step #4 Constantly Update and Evolve Your Affirmations
As you continue to grow, improve, and evolve, so should your affirmations. When you come up with a new goal, dream, or any extraordinary result that you want to create for your life, add it to your affirmations.
V is for Visualization
Visualization is a technique for using your imagination to create what you want in life.
Visualization is a well-known habit of top performing athletes, who use it to enhance their performance. What is less well known is that successful salespeople, the top achievers, use it just as frequently.
Visualize your major goals, deepest desires, and most exciting, would-totally-change-my-life-if-I-achieved-them dreams. See, feel, hear, touch, taste, and smell every detail of your vision. Involve all of your senses to maximize the effectiveness of your visualization. The more vivid you make your vision, the more compelled you’ll be to take the necessary actions to make it a reality.
Fast forward into the future to see yourself achieving your ideal outcomes and results. You can either look toward the near future—the end of the day—or further into the future, like I did while writing this book. See yourself accomplishing what you set out to accomplish, and experience how good it will feel to have followed through and achieved your goals.
E is for Exercise
Even a few minutes of exercise each morning significantly enhances your health, improves your self-confidence and emotional well being, and enables you to think better and concentrate longer. You’ll also notice how quickly your energy level increases with daily exercise, and your clients will notice it, too—even over the phone.
Personal development experts and self-made multi-millionaire entrepreneurs Eben Pagan and Anthony Robbins (who is also a bestselling author) both agree that the number one key to success is to “start every morning off with a personal success ritual.” Included in both of their success rituals is some type of morning exercise. If it’s good enough for Eben and Tony, it’s good enough for me!
You can go for a walk or run, hit the gym, throw on a P90X or Insanity DVD, watch a yoga video on YouTube, or find a Life S.A.V.E.R.S. buddy to play some early morning racquetball. There’s also an excellent app called 7 Minute Workout that gives you a full body workout in—you guessed it—seven minutes. The choice is yours—just pick one and do it.
As a salesperson, you are on the go. You need an endless reserve of energy to capitalize on all of the opportunities that are going to come your way, and a daily morning exercise practice is going to provide it.
R is for Reading
One of the fastest ways to achieve everything you want is to model successful people. For every goal you have, there’s a good chance there’s an expert out there who has already achieved the same thing, or something similar. As Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues.
Fortunately, some of the best of the best have shared their stories throughout history in the form of writing. And that means all those success blueprints are just waiting out there for anyone willing to invest some time in reading. Books are a limitless supply of help and mentorship, right at your fingertips.
There are plenty of books, in addition to this one, written by those who have achieved super sales success. Here are some of Hal’s favorites on selling:
- High Trust Selling by Todd Duncan
- Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
- The Sales Bible by Jeffrey Gitomer
- The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone
- 7L: The Seven Levels of Communication by Michael J. Maher
- The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
- The SPEED of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey
- Go for No! by Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz
S is for Scribing
Scribing is simply another word for writing. Most Miracle Morning practitioners scribe in a journal, for five to ten minutes, during their Miracle Morning. By getting your thoughts out of your head and putting them in writing, you’ll immediately gain heightened awareness, clarity, and valuable insights that you’d otherwise be oblivious to.
As Tony Robbins has said many times, “A life worth living is a life worth recording.”
Also a great practice to add to your routine is to write what you appreciate about different aspects of your business. When we write down the things we appreciate about our team and their performance, for example, even (and particularly) when we feel less than wonderful about it, it’s easier to focus and capitalize on what’s going well. The practice of recording appreciations helps you focus on the positive, which will help you stay flexible and solution focused even when circumstances are challenging.
What you appreciate … APPRECIATES.