A daily sales plan is a great selling and selling technique. Your daily sales plan isn’t just going to work every day, making calls, and scheduling and scheduling appointments. That’s what I call “hopium.” When your plan is “hopium,” you’re just showing up, following the sales moves, and hoping for something good to happen, like some sales. We both know that waiting for something to happen won’t actually make it happen, so how about we try a plan?

You probably don’t wake up every morning motivated and wanting to hit the ground running. A plan helps you get good results even if your motivation is still at home in bed. The reason your plan helps you so much is because you have to act on your plan to implement it and carry it out every day, whether you want to or not. Something funny happens along the way as you carry out your plan. Your motivation increases because you start to get good results.

What should you include in your daily sales plan? If you want to be a great producer, you will have to do what the best producers do: you will have to work on yourself, you will have to have specific goals or objectives that you strive to achieve, and you have to develop self-motivation and self-leadership. All that on top of the actual sales activities, it’s no wonder there are so few at the top.

It really is not as difficult as it may seem at first glance. Working on oneself is about self-development and learning. The fastest way to develop is to get help from the experts. Look to those outside of your organization who have an unbiased view of you and what you are or are not doing. When you set your sales goals, you really need to think about the big picture. You make sales because you want money, you want money because you want something else. You usually think in terms of tangible things, like maybe a new car, a better house, or a nice vacation. Ultimately, isn’t what you really want the ability to spend your time the way you want to come from financial freedom? So think about how your goals for today relate to what you want one day and stay focused on today.

Self-motivation and self-leadership are among the most useful tools you can have in your sales and sales techniques toolkit. An amazing thing happens when you focus on one day at a time and do whatever it takes to make today a success. When you just focus on today and make today a success, you feel really good about yourself and today. That is very motivating. Your motivation, coupled with persistence, determination, and focus on the right things, drives you to do the things you may not like or want to do, and that’s self-leadership. Suddenly, everything starts to fall into place one day at a time.