There’s good stress – which is good luck for your sales and your career. And then there’s bad stress, or distress — which is bad luck for your sales and your career. The good news is, you get to pick your stress.

The reason you go to work is to sell. The reason you go to work to sell is to make money. The reason you go to work to sell to make money is to be successful and/or provide a quality life for yourself and your family. With good intentions, some of you have let this get out of hand, though. Some of you are spending double shifts hoping a customer will show up so you can sell a car and make some money. That may sound great for the gung-ho, wanna be superstar. But in real life, it doesn’t pan out. And that’s when problems start.

There are two kinds of stress: the good kind and the bad kind. In the beginning, sleeping on a cot in Parts ‘til the doors open again tomorrow may seem like the way to get to the top in sales. And in the beginning, the stress is great because instead of slowing you down, it actually pumps you up. But with 95% of the people in sales, the hours start to take their toll. After 60 days, or 90 days or two years of busting your buns, you physically and mentally start to wear down.

Then comes a bad day, week or month, and everything starts to fall apart.

Somewhere along the line, the good stress became distress. Your adrenaline supply gets overused and your system backs up. Then the problems start, and in the long run you lose because you burn out and can’t handle it anymore. You get tired, cranky with your managers and customers, the other salespeople start to ride you about not being such a hotshot now and you blow out one day in a blast of anger or frustration.

If it gets this far and you quit, now you lose your consistent income. You lose the deals you had working. You lose the customer base you were building. And if you’re not careful, you can lose your self-confidence. All from trying to skip steps to get to the top, instead of taking the solid, deliberate steps to succeed in sales.

Don’t misunderstand — I’m not suggesting you don’t put in the effort it takes to become more successful, or work hard or put your all into your profession. I’m just reminding you that if you’re serious about long-term success, instead of burying yourself in long, unproductive hours, it’s time to set priorities and set some goals.

I am 100% for success and becoming a professional, and you couldn’t have picked a better profession. And if you take becoming a professional step-by-step and learn all you can about selling, learn all you can about your product and learn all you can about people, you can easily earn $75,000, $100,000, or $300,000 a year working decent hours.

Most salespeople lack clear goals and the skills they need, so they put in a ton of extra hours and still miss most sales. If that’s you, it usually happens because:

• You’re not very organized and it takes you two shifts to accomplish what you could do in a single shift.

• You’ve gotten into the habit of just hanging around and wait for an “up” instead of working your full shift doing something to sell a vehicle.

• You haven’t learned enough about selling or haven’t applied what you learned, which means you have to talk to a lot more people to close a sale.

• You don’t follow-up every prospect on the lot or lead you get. You think follow-up is a waste of time. (Shake yourself and wake up: 78% buy!)

• You don’t follow-up long enough. One unprepared phone call to an unsold prospect probably won’t get them back on the lot for another shot at a sale.

• You don’t follow-up to develop repeat business. One quick note about perfect CSI Scores to the people you’ve sold won’t build you a solid customer base.

• You fell for all that stuff the six-car guy told you about lookers and shoppers so you prequalify everyone first.

• You skip the demo and other steps because you think only a few people are really buying a car, especially when they say, “We’re just looking.”

• You think people are buying price and spend your presentation trying to get them excited about the price, the rebate or the rates instead of about the product and what it will do for them.

Time out! Would you like a “distress” free job? Learn to sell, then go to work to ‘work’, train daily, treat everybody like a buyer, focus on value, close on budget and follow-up to retain your customers and you will be distress free.

It is a choice. Since you have to work tomorrow either way, why not turn pro so you can make some real money in sales?