Letting Go of the Past and Focusing on NOW

We all have stories from the past we fondly remember. There are memories we want to keep forever and enjoy sharing with others.

A favorite story of mine happened when I was about five years old. Whenever we would have friends and relatives over for dinner, my parents would let me stay up late and sing my favorite songs to them. So there I was standing in the middle of the living room singing my little heart out. I adored the attention, applause and hugs they gave me. This is a story I can still remember so clearly. I think it’s one of the reasons I love leading to people.

Then there are the unpleasant stories we carry around with us that we’re unwilling to let go of. An event happens that negatively impacts our thoughts and feelings about ourselves. We hold onto these stories for so long, we believe they’re true. These stories keep us from appreciating what we have in the present because we believe it will happen again. So we stop taking risks for fear that what happened in the past will happen again. It affects how we communicate, relate to others, grow our businesses, and even stops us from going after all the things we really want.

I can remember a story I held onto for many years. I grew up in a family of five brothers and sisters. I was the youngest one in the family. I can remember having dinner on Sundays with my family and my oldest brother telling me to “Keep quiet, eat your dinner, nobody is interested in what you have to say.” Being the youngest, I believed what he said was the true. Nobody was really interested in what a little girl had to say. So I stopped speaking up. If I did say something, I spoke very quickly or I’d say what I thought you wanted to hear.

Through the years, not speaking up had a huge impact on my life. I was afraid to say what I thought and ask for what I wanted. In fact, I’d say what I thought you wanted to hear. If someone did something that upset me, I wouldn’t say anything. I would withdraw and be silent. I had no voice.

I was committed to breaking through this barrier. I thought about what my brother said. He had said what he said and nothing more. I had added all the meaning to it. Having this insight was a huge breakthrough for me. I was free again. I had found my voice. I was no longer a five-year old little girl without a voice. I had something to say that mattered. From that point on, my life changed forever. I left a job I had been at for 10 years, where I did not express myself, and went to work for a training company. There I was trained to lead workshops and help people learn to speak up. I had found my voice and was now fulfilling my dream!

These stories have been holding us back for years. We allowed something that happened a long time ago to keep us from growing and reaching our full potential.

Remember this—Successful people create each day newly. They never allow past events to stop them. And it makes perfect sense. Whatever has happened in the past is over. Just because it may have been a disappointing experience does not mean it will happen again.

When you believe it will happen again, you are sending a message to your subconscious that “I believe I will fail again.” You are giving power to something that happened in the past. And, what you believe will happen, will happen.

People that know they are responsible for creating their own successes will learn from past experiences, make the changes, and get into action.

What do successful people all have in common?

• They left the past in the past.
  
  
• They’ve created their lives newly.
  
  
• Giving up is not in their vocabulary.
  
  
• They live their lives from three words…Yes, I can!
  
  
• They’ve had to overcome struggles and adversity throughout their lives but it’s only made them stronger.
  
  
• They have a HUGE life purpose.
  
  
• They are focused, intentional, and committed.
  
  
• They believe in themselves and their purpose.
  
  
• They see life as a place where anything is possible rather than impossible.
  

When you let go of the past, you’re then free to create anything you want. It’s as if you have a clean canvas and from the clean canvas you can paint your life newly. You’re no longer held back by something that happened long ago and is over.

Eckhart Tolle writes in his book, A New Earth, “…nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now. We can learn to break the habit of accumulating and perpetuating old emotions regardless of whether something happened yesterday or thirty years ago. We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds but to return our attention continuously to the present.”

The past can only stop you if you choose to allow it to stop you. The past event has nothing to do with who you are in the present. What happened in the past, is over. We only have right now. And, right now, you get to say how you want your life to go.

So, what can you do to let go of the past? You can focus on NOW! What is it that you want to have in your life right now? All we have right now is this moment. Be present to your life right now—this moment. We don’t know what’s in the future. When you create what you want in your life now, you’re creating a new future.

© 2008. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission from Rochelle Togo-Figa, Professional Sales Coach, is prohibited.

If you would like to use this article on your website, or for your own ezine, not a problem; however, there’s one thing you MUST include: Rochelle Togo-Figa, The Sales Breakthrough Expert, is the creator of the Sales Breakthrough System™, a proven step-by-step sales process that will help you close more sales, sign on more clients and make more money with ease and velocity. To sign up for her free sales articles and teleclasses on closing more sales, visit www.SalesBreakthroughs.com.

4 Surefire Ways to Turn Prospects into Buyers

Prospecting is a term that’s been around for a long time. It goes way back to the mid 1800s when miners went out west to make their fortunes digging for gold. The strategies are the same as for the gold-miners, except instead of digging for ore, you’re digging for customers, with your mind focused on this: you want to find the right prospects—the serious buyers. When you find buyers who are interested in your product, it as if you found “gold”.

Ideally, even though we want to have customers come to us via networking, word of mouth, and referrals—all the strategies we employ to get ourselves known—sometimes we need to actively get out there and find clients, and that leads us to prospecting. Prospecting is simply finding new customers who can and will buy from you within a reasonable period of time.

That means you have to be out there, talking to a lot of people, and that may involve cold calling—picking up the phone, dialing the number, and introducing yourself to find out if the person on the other end is a qualified prospect. When you’re prospecting, you’re calling people you don’t necessarily know.

Of course, I’d love for all of you to be getting referrals and leads from people you know and by word of mouth, but prospecting is a legitimate way to generate leads and new business opportunities. Like all selling strategies, it takes time and consistency.

There are steps to follow that can make prospecting easy and effective. Let’s take a look at 4 surefire ways to find and turn prospects into serious buyers:

1. Identify Your Market
   Find a market that interests and excites you; a market you’re comfortable with and knowledgeable about. It could be an industry you’ve previously worked in, or where you know there’s a need for your services. Go where you know you have something to offer.
   


2. Make a List
   Make a list of all the prospects you want to call. These could be past clients you’ve worked with, people you know can benefit from your services, people who expressed interest but didn’t buy from you in the past, or companies you’ve been wanting to break into to inform them of your product or service.
   


3. Do Your Research
   Organize yourself before you pick up the phone. Find out who the contact person is, who the buyer is, their phone number and email address. Doing your research means going the extra mile, and, in a sense, becoming a detective. One way to become a detective is to read a prospect’s website thoroughly.
   
   In short, learn everything you can about a prospect before you call. Read the website, order the annual report. Even if it’s a small or medium-sized business, there may be a letter from the president about what’s going on in the company.
   
   When you learn everything about the company, when you call, you can say right off the bat, “I just saw your website and want to congratulate you on that great product that you’re about to launch.” Or, “I see that you’ve had a successful previous year.” They’ll be very impressed that you’ve gone the extra mile to learn about them.
   


4. Craft a Compelling Message
   You have about 30 seconds before the person you call decides whether or not she even wants to stay on the phone with you, so you don’t have a lot of time. Make sure to make those first few seconds of your call matter most by delivering a statement that grabs their attention. It includes the following steps:
   


• Identify yourself and your company.
• Say what you do.
• Position you and your company as the expert.
• Mention something you saw about them on their website.
• State the reason for your call.
• Close for the meeting.
  

Remember, your purpose for calling is to get a meeting—nothing more than that. Provide enough information to stimulate their curiosity enough to hear them say, “Yes, I will meet with you.”

Your Assignment:

• Select a prospect with whom you want to get a meeting.
  
  
• Visit their website to learn more about them and their service.
  
  
• Find the name of the buyer, their phone number, and email address.
  
  
• Craft a compelling message using the 6 steps.
  
  
• Then make the call and get the appointment.
  

© 2008. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission from Rochelle Togo-Figa, Professional Sales Coach, is prohibited.

If you would like to use this article on your website, or for your own ezine, not a problem; however, there’s one thing you MUST include: Rochelle Togo-Figa, The Sales Breakthrough Expert, is the creator of the Sales Breakthrough System™, a proven step-by-step sales process that will help you close more sales, sign on more clients and make more money with ease and velocity. To sign up for her free sales articles and teleclasses on closing more sales, visit www.SalesBreakthroughs.com.

Stop Sabotaging Yourself and Get Into Action!

Whenever we step into something new or take on something we’ve never done before, it’s not uncommon to experience fear. It could be the fear of failure, fear of rejection, or fear of success. The fear can manifest itself in different ways that we’re not always aware of. Some signs of hidden fear are: Procrastination, distraction, excuses, feeling stuck, feeling overwhelm, negative beliefs, worried, and anxious.

Let me share a story of a client and how she dealt with her fear. Maybe you’ll see yourself in this story.

Christina came to me because she had started a new business, and was not taking the steps to get it off the ground. She’s extremely talented and had huge success in her corporate position. She had enough of the corporate world and was eager to start her own business. She had no problem creating new ideas for her boss and presenting to vendors, but when it came to promoting herself and her business to others, suddenly she was stuck.

Christina had made a list of people to contact. These were people she knew and could possibly help her. When I asked her why she wasn’t following up with these people, her response was, “Well, they told me they would call me and since they never returned my calls, I assumed they’re not interested.” I asked her, “Did they tell you they’re not interested?” She responded “No, I just assumed they weren’t interested since they didn’t call back.”

In reality, she didn’t know why they weren’t calling her back. She had made up a story and was stopped because she believed her story was true. Christina was transferring her own thoughts, beliefs and perceptions onto these people. And, the more she listened to her own thoughts, the more she believed they were true.

I suggested to Christina there might be others reasons they’re not calling her back. They could be either busy or away.

She realized these excuses and reasons for not calling these people were also covering up her fear of rejection. What if they don’t want to help me? What if they’re not interested? As long as she believed these thoughts to be true, nothing would change and her business would suffer.

Once she distinguished her fear of failing was a self-imposed negative belief and not the truth, she began to feel freed up. The fear no longer had to keep her stopped. She knew she had created these self-limiting thoughts and they were not true. We took the negative thoughts and reframed them into positive thoughts. And every time the fear would come up, Christina would shift her thinking to a powerful, positive thought. This took practice but over time it became a new habit and easy to do. We then created a step-by-step plan and she got into action. What followed was amazing!

Christine was re-energized and ready to go forward. She contacted all the people on her list, completed her website, and started sending out letters introducing her services. The positive responses she received from people she had reached out to helped her to feel more confident and gave her more clarity on the direction of her business. And, the best news is two companies she had contacted have expressed interest in hiring her. These results happened when Christina identified the fear that had been holding her back, realized she had created the negative thoughts and changed her thoughts, created an action plan, and then got into action.

Your Assignment:

• When you feel stopped, step away from your office and spend quiet time with yourself.
  
  
• Write down all the thoughts you’re having at this time.
  
  
• Then ask yourself, “Did I make up these thoughts?”
  
  
• Write down the answer next to each thought. You’ll see that many of these thoughts are made up by you.
  
  
• Write down the steps you can take NOW to get you into action.
  
  
• Visualize yourself being in action and how it feels.
  
  
• Write down the date you will take action and the outcome you want to achieve. (Example: I will call Jim on Monday and he will be happy to hear from me, or he'll have someone to refer me to.)
  

© 2008. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission from Rochelle Togo-Figa, Professional Sales Coach, is prohibited.

If you would like to use this article on your website, or for your own ezine, not a problem; however, there’s one thing you MUST include: Rochelle Togo-Figa, The Sales Breakthrough Expert, is the creator of the Sales Breakthrough System™, a proven step-by-step sales process that will help you close more sales, sign on more clients and make more money with ease and velocity. To sign up for her free sales articles and teleclasses on closing more sales, visit www.SalesBreakthroughs.com.

5 Steps to Believing YOU Can

A key step to creating success in your life starts with believing in yourself and believing you can do it. When you have a powerful positive belief system, nothing can shake your foundation. It is the core of who you are.

Do you believe in yourself? The best way to answer this question is to look at where your life is right now. Do you have all the things you really want in your life? Are you satisfied with what you’ve accomplished? Do you believe your wishes/dreams will come true?

We may want to believe we can have anything we want, yet something gets in the way of that happening. And that “something” can be limiting thoughts. Those nasty little thoughts sneak in and keep us from feeling good about who we are.

It’s not unusual after you take on something big in your life, like starting your own business or doing something you’ve never done before, to have all your doubts and fears come up. Some familiar thoughts you may have are, “Can I do this?” “What if I fail?” “Am I good enough?”

I can remember when I decided I wanted to take my business to the next level; I was so excited. I knew it was time to play a bigger game but then those nasty thoughts started to creep in. There was always this little voice in my head saying, “You don’t have what it takes. You’re not smart enough. What if you fail?” I knew if things were going to change, it was up to me to make those changes. I then took the steps to shifting my thinking forever.

Here are 5 steps I created to help you to believe you can:

1. Love yourself for who you are. Before you can let love in, you must first learn to love who you are. We are all whole and complete just as we are. We all came into this world as magnificent human beings fully expressed. Sadly, many people walk around feeling there is something wrong with them and with the world. And, they’re never satisfied with what they have or who they are. They never appreciate what they’ve accomplished because they’re always thinking “what’s next?”
   
   The good news is nothing’s wrong, there’s nothing to fix, there is no where to get to because you’re already there. There is nothing you need to do to make yourself better because you’re perfect just as you are.
   
   
2. Trust. So often, we walk through life with an expectation that things “should be” a certain way. And, when that doesn’t happen, we’re upset, frustrated, and angry. We then make ourselves and others wrong. We start walking around complaining and blaming others.
   
   There were many times when I was frustrated about my business. I had limiting thoughts like, “Why don’t I have more clients? I’m never going to make the money I want to make.”
   I then took on practicing a new way of thinking. I consciously changed my thoughts and focused on trusting it would turn out. And each morning, I would think of what I wanted in my life and business and say, “I trust it will come to me.” When I did that, the door of abundance opened up and new opportunities flowed in.
   
   
3. Appreciate your accomplishments. If you want to attract more abundance into your life, slow down and allow yourself to be present to your accomplishments. When we take the time to do this, we’re opening up a space of more of the same to come to us.
   
   Think about it this way. If you spend most of your time thinking about what you don’t have, what do you think you’ll attract the most? That’s right! You attract that which you focus on the most. Most times we rush through life thinking about the next thing rather than appreciating what have right now.
   
   When you take the time to appreciate your accomplishments, you are allowing yourself to bask in the victory of what you have achieved.
   
   
4. Be Grateful. Quite often, people dwell on what they don’t have and complain why they don’t have what they want. And the more they do that, the more they perpetuate the same. Remember, like attracts like. They focus on the future and that some day they’ll have more money or more clients.
   
   It’s just as important to your happiness to take time to be grateful for the things you have right now and have already accomplished. When you do that, you’re immersing yourself in the positive energetic forces of life that are around you. And, what you focus your attention on most is what comes to you. The more you are grateful for, the more you open yourself up to attracting more of the same.
   
   Here’s a brief statement taken from Joe Vitale’s book, The Attractor Factor. “Feel thankful for your life, your lungs, your home, it doesn’t matter. Once you feel grateful, you are in an energy that can create miracles.”
   
   
5. Choices. You are where you are because of choices you made. The choices we make in our lives help to make us who we are today. If you don’t like what you have, you can change it. When you decided to start your business that was a choice you made.
   
   Each day we have thousands and thousands of thoughts. We may not think we can choose our thoughts but that’s because we think we have no say in how we think. However, the truth is, if we don’t like the thoughts we have, we can change them and choose more positive thoughts.
   
   Every day you get to choose how the day is going to go. So why not make it a great one! It's a conscious choice you make to believe in yourself and you can start today.

© 2008. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission from Rochelle Togo-Figa, Professional Sales Coach, is prohibited.

If you would like to use this article on your website, or for your own ezine, not a problem; however, there’s one thing you MUST include: Rochelle Togo-Figa, The Sales Breakthrough Expert, is the creator of the Sales Breakthrough System™, a proven step-by-step sales process that will help you close more sales, sign on more clients and make more money with ease and velocity. To sign up for her free sales articles and teleclasses on closing more sales, visit www.SalesBreakthroughs.com.

6 Ways to Increase Your Sales NOW

Now is the time to become a “smart” entrepreneur about your business by doing more not less. What I mean by “doing more” is increasing your sales and marketing efforts. Instead of pulling back as many entrepreneurs are currently doing, beat out your competitors by finding new ways to stay visible.

An economic slowdown can be a problem for your business if you allow it to be. Or, it can be an opportunity to gain new clients and boost your sales if you know and have mastered the marketing and sales methods that work best during these times.

Right now, many successful entrepreneurs are rubbing their hands together in eager anticipation of new opportunities because they know many of their competitors are pulling back. With less competition, it makes it easy for them to go after business.

Consider that although people may be more cautious in spending money, they do still need services. The person they’ll do business with will be the one who provides the best value and finds creative ways to stay in front of them.

Here are 6 sales and marketing strategies to maintain and even increase sales, no matter what’s going on around you.

1. Follow Up. I’m amazed to hear entrepreneurs say they only follow up one or two times and sometimes never at all. People may not be ready today to buy from you but if they expressed interest, they’ll probably be ready to buy in the next several months. They say it can take 7-10 or more touches to move the client to making a buying decision. You want to come up with creative ways to stay in touch, so when they’re ready to buy they’ll remember you.
   
   
2. Reactivate dormant accounts. Reaching out to past clients can make customers for life. Let them know you’re there for them and be generous by offering some ideas to help them in their business. One phone call can make a huge difference. Think about it. When was the last time a past vendor called you with some ideas for your business? When you go the extra mile and show them you’re there to help them, they’ll appreciate you and remember that when they’re ready to do business.
   
   
3. Make special offers. Offer a product or service at a special low fee for a limited time. Give catchy names to these special offers. Some examples are: Close-out Sale, Scratch and Dent Sale, Half Price Sale, Birthday Sale, My Dog Maxx’s Birthday Sale, Xmas Sale, Coupon Sale, Free 30-Day Trial. You’ll need to put a time limit on the offer to encourage people to buy now and not later. Also, it helps to explain why you’re having the sale, so they know you don’t just drop prices whenever you feel like it.
   
   
4. Up sell to generate additional revenue. When a client purchases your product, you can offer other services at a nominal fee that will compliment the product they’ve just purchased. This is done in many places. For example, at many hotels they now charge you a ‘resort fee’ of $20 a day. And for that fee, they list a series of amenities you receive. Although this is a small fee, with the volume of customers, this fee adds up.
   
   
5. Add value to your existing service. During times when your customers may be concerned about pricing, another way to win them over is offering the best value for their dollar. You can do this by enhancing your service with “extras.” An extra might be faster delivery than your competitors, a larger selection, easier payment options, or a better guarantee.
   
   
6. Be positive. I’m a big believer in staying positive. Now is the time to surround yourself with positive people, say positive affirmations daily, read books that make you feel good, listen to people who share their secrets for achieving success, take time to nurture yourself, and most of all believe in yourself and stay in action!
   
   © 2008. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission from Rochelle Togo-Figa, Professional Sales Coach, is prohibited.
   
   If you would like to use this article on your website, or for your own ezine, not a problem; however, there’s one thing you MUST include: Rochelle Togo-Figa, The Sales Breakthrough Expert, is the creator of the Sales Breakthrough System™, a proven step-by-step sales process that will help you close more sales, sign on more clients and make more money with ease and velocity. To sign up for her free sales articles and teleclasses on closing more sales, visit www.SalesBreakthroughs.com.