Newer sales professionals will always have something to learn from sales veterans. But given the rapid changes in technologies that help grow revenue, no one can truly claim to have an advantage based on the number of years he or she has been in the business. A sales veteran is someone who knows how difficult it is to carry the bag and who has hopefully learned more than a few ways to lighten that load. It's important to pass that knowledge on to newer members of the sales team. It's equally important, however, that experienced sales professionals work to stay sharp. In today's world, you're either linked in or left out.

"Flexibility in a time of great change is a vital quality of leadership."

Too often, salespeople are too quick to talk up the wonders of their terrific solutions. Before you start trumpeting the virtues of your product, service, or company, do your homework and diligently assess your prospect's unique circumstances. Great salespeople approach a customer or prospect's problem with the mind-set of a physician, methodically probing and analyzing symptoms before arriving at a diagnosis. Be curious, and be real. Let go of preconceived ideas and open yourself up by paying close attention to the needs of other people.

"An effective leader develops the ability to correctly identify the pertinent detail or details - incidentals in a market, industry or sport that might create an incremental advantage."

"The quality of our expectations determines the quality of our actions."

When you wake up in the morning, what are your first thoughts? Are they positive thoughts, or do you start the day consumed by dread, fear, stress, or worry? Even if you're not a morning person and have trouble formulating distinct thoughts before a shower and coffee, you're already tapping into the feelings and emotions that can shape the rest of the day. Pay attention to what you're thinking right at the very start of each morning, and take steps to make sure those thoughts are positive and free from negative influences.

Imagine that you have no limitations and then decide what's right before you decide what's possible."

"Develop your imagination - you can use it to create in your mind what you hope to create in your life."

"Your needs will be met once you can find a way of projecting energy and fulfilling someone else's need."

"Of course you want to be rich and famous. It's natural. Wealth and fame are what every man desires. The question is: What are you willing to trade for it?"

"Miracles sometimes occur, but one has to work terribly hard for them"

Begin your day by feeling grateful. Be grateful for the bed you just slept in, the roof over your head, the carpet or floor under your feet, the running water, the soap, your shower, your toothbrush, your clothes, your shoes, the refrigerator that keeps your food cold, the car that you drive, your job, your friends. Be grateful for the stores that make it so easy to buy the things you need, the restaurants, the utilities, services, and electrical appliances that make your life effortless. Be grateful for the magazines and the books that you read. Be grateful for the chair that you sit on, and the pavement that you walk on. Be grateful for the weather, the sun, the sky, the birds, the trees, the grass, the rain, and the flowers.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

"The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people half way."

In sales, attitude is king. Do you have a winning attitude? If you don't truly believe that there are sales out there waiting to be made, then making 100 phone calls, having the perfect script, and doing loads of research won't help. You may, for example, find yourself prefacing your conversations with self-defeating statements. But don't dwell on what won't work or what's not going right. Be confident that you can find the win-win in any situation, and you'll learn what a positive impact attitude can have.

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes."

This will give you a sense of tremendous accomplishment and provide momentum for finishing your tasks: 1) Make your final hours at work enjoyable by saving for last the tasks you find pleasant. 2) Remember to go task by task. If you finish one task at a time, you will avoid feeling fragmented and overburdened. It is also easier to see where you're going with a job when you give it your full concentration. 3) Leave some time between activities to minimize overlapping.

There is a difference between feeling gratitude and appreciation for something, and feeling attachment to something. Appreciation and gratitude are states of pure love, while attachment contains fear – fear of losing or not having what you are attached to. When it comes to something you want in your life, appreciation and gratitude attracts, and attachment pushes away. If you are feeling afraid that you will not get what you want, or losing what you have, then you have attachment.

To remove the attachment, keep shifting yourself into a state of appreciation and gratitude, until you can feel that the fear has gone.

Do you take time to enjoy the little things? Stress, disappointment, and anxiety are inescapable parts of modern life. But you can change the way you react to them. Laughter is one of best tension releases. Find things to laugh about and people to laugh with. Laughter is a great antidote for taking life too seriously. Learning to interrupt a stress-producing activity will help give you the break that you need from tension. You'll return to your activity refreshed and ready to be more productive. Finally, make happy plans. Anticipation is a good feeling that can help boost enjoyment of life experiences.

"Dreams never hurt anybody if he keeps working right behind the dream to make as much of it become real as he can."

"In each of us are places where we have never gone. Only by pressing the limits do you ever find them."

"I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy."

Let's face it: almost anything can cause stress. Stressors are different for each person, and they can be positive or negative. There's no doubt about it – selling can be a very stressful profession. There is pressure to prospect, sell, service, deliver, and make your numbers – and still try to balance your personal life and sales career. How can you cope? Plan your work and work your plan. Set achievable, not impossible, goals. If you can, delegate tasks to other people and concentrate on what you do best – selling. Remember that if there's a problem with a customer, it's not personal; it's just business.

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young."

"Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind."

Salespeople need to address emotions. It doesn't help to obsess about rejection and disappointment. It's easy to fall into the poor-me syndrome or fall prey to negative emotions, such as hurt, anger, or fear. But the most successful salespeople find ways to get over it, stay focused, and continue on. When you're feeling down in the dumps, rethink the way you evaluate sales performance. Instead of evaluating yourself on the number of closed sales, look at the progress you're making in each component of the overall sales process. It's very possible that you're accomplishing positive things, such as securing more appointments, making more presentations, and meeting more decision makers.

"An amazing thing, the human brain. Capable of understanding incredibly complex and intricate concepts. Yet at times unable to recognize the obvious and simple."

Ask 10 people to define success, and you'll probably get 10 different answers. Over the years, executive coach Tony Jeary says success is defined as "achieving objectives we have established in advance. Anything else is by chance or serendipity," he writes in his book Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life. "The most successful people live their lives on purpose. They don't sit around waiting to see what might happen next."

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

"Everyone starts from scratch, but not everyone keeps on scratching!"

"We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."

There is a difference between feeling gratitude and appreciation for something, and feeling attachment to something. Appreciation and gratitude are states of pure love, while attachment contains fear – fear of losing or not having what you are attached to. When it comes to something you want in your life, appreciation and gratitude attracts, and attachment pushes away. If you are feeling afraid that you will not get what you want, or losing what you have, then you have attachment.

To remove the attachment, keep shifting yourself into a state of appreciation and gratitude, until you can feel that the fear has gone.

"A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one."

Assumptions about other people and what they want or don't want can wreak havoc on your relationships. This is just as true in your professional life as in your personal life. Learn specific skills and strategies for making sure you are fully aware of other people's objectives. Try these actions: ask clarifying questions, probe for information, and objectively point out inconsistencies when tasks seem out of line with stated goals or agreed-upon strategies.

In sales, we hear a lot about winners and losers. But top achievers don't restrict their thinking or adhere to rigid characterizations. Instead, they accept people for who they are as individuals. They are flexible in their business dealings and favor compromise. They refuse to think that there is only one right answer to every question. They allow themselves to trust others, and they accept people as they are without judging them.

"If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough."

You can't improve a situation until you improve yourself. Since you have to start somewhere, don't shrug your shoulders. Plug away. Define the problem. Develop an awareness that change is necessary for solutions to evolve. Solutions come to those who take the personal responsibility of discovering them. Once your solution is discovered, act on your own desire to create a better you. We do a disservice to ourselves and those around us when we ignore problems and fail to stand up and help solve them.

"I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that's as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you."

"The barriers are not erected that can say to aspiring talents and industry, "This far and no farther.""

You must be happy now to bring happiness into your life through the law of attraction. It's a simple formula. Happiness attracts happiness. Yet people use so many excuses as to why they can't be happy. They use excuses of debt, excuses of health, excuses of relationships, and excuses of all sorts of things as to why they can't use this simple formula. But the formula is the law.

No matter what the excuse, unless you begin to feel happy despite it, you cannot attract happiness. The law of attraction is saying to you, "Be happy now, and as long as you keep doing that, I will give you unlimited happiness."

"The greatest force in the human body is
the natural drive of the body to heal itself - but that force is not independent of the belief system.
Everything begins with belief.
What we believe is the most powerful option of all."

It isn't just your attitude, behavior, and personality that dictate how well you're prepared to succeed. The technology and tools you use also say a lot about your capacity to deliver great results. Has it been too long since you upgraded your mobile devices? Do you make regular use of online solutions that can help you sell better and faster? Make sure you're using the tools that positively influence how customers see you and your professionalism.

"The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire."

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

A personal slowdown challenges us to sit down and discover our hidden assets, appreciate our loyal customers and create better ways to serve them, capture new markets, and discover new opportunities. There is no time to give in to negativity. Challenges are the great incubators of new ideas. It's our job to provide the seeds for success in whatever soil we find ourselves. If we keep on shoveling and planting, we can make things grow.

"The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar of coffee, and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun."

For some salespeople, their relationship with their boss has very little impact on their work/life happiness. For others, however, managers have a significant impact on how they feel about their work/life balance and even their day-to-day lives. It is important for both managers and salespeople to be cognizant of the different dynamics at play and actively work together toward building a stronger relationship. Doing so will not only increase work/life happiness but also improve on-the-job efficiency and productivity.

"People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine."

         If you have "needing money" in your vibration, then you will keep attracting needing money. You have to find a way of being happy NOW, feeling good NOW, and being in joy NOW, without the money, because those great feelings are how you will feel with the money.

Money doesn't bring happiness – but happiness brings money.

Our thoughts shape who we are and how far in life we go. Whatever you choose to think about and whatever information you choose to absorb will determine your attitude. In turn, your attitude affects how much success you will have and how soon you will have it. For a brighter mood and a brighter tomorrow, get your brain in gear today, and make a conscious decision to raise your spirits.

Fear can launch an avalanche of negative thoughts and emotions. What's your defense? First, realize that anxiety is a normal part of life. To counter anxiety, build a strong defense system by becoming an avid positive thinker with positive thoughts and emotions. Try to prevent anxiety from building up or making a sneak attack. Be aware of your own feelings, and you'll be better equipped to nip anxiety in the bud. Remember that everyone experiences anxiety. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "He who is not every day conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life."

Not everyone works in a positive environment. Salespeople can go for days dealing with one unhappy, angry, or dissatisfied customer after another. They can experience bouts of rejection that last for weeks. But it's possible to maintain a happy mind-set, despite being surrounded by negative circumstances. According to the author of "The Happiness Advantage," only 10 percent of happiness depends on our external world. The other 90 percent depends on how our brain processes the world. So instead of focusing on the problems, mistakes, and dangers that might surround you, make a positive choice to look at and be grateful for the good things in your life.

"Three components make an entrepreneur: the person, the idea, and the resources to make it happen."

"Your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing."

Technically, every job is temporary (as is life). The trouble with the "temporary" attitude is that it makes us take the tasks at hand less seriously than is necessary to do an outstanding job. The result is that salespeople who take their jobs seriously tend to move up the career ladder faster than those who think sales is a temporary thing. Commit yourself to sales, and watch your success take off.

"The one word that makes a good manager - decisiveness."

"You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great."

Take your work seriously, but take time off for yourself and your family, as well. With balance between your professional and personal life, you'll enjoy the best of both worlds. At work, try to turn mundane tasks into games when you can. Compete with other salespeople, for example, to find out who can set the most appointments in a single day, or talk to your manager about injecting more fun and excitement into an otherwise boring weekly meeting.

"As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness."

If you have "needing money" in your vibration, then you will keep attracting needing money. You have to find a way of being happy NOW, feeling good NOW, and being in joy NOW, without the money, because those great feelings are how you will feel with the money.

Money doesn't bring happiness – but happiness brings money.

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but also the parent of all the others."

The secret to getting to your peak zone of positivity lies in the ability to focus your attitude in a consistent and conscious manner. When you're able to focus in a routine manner, you create the basis of a happy and productive life. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to achieving our peak zone of positivity.

"Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously and never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture!"

"I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it."

Starting a sales career is like flying a plane: to get off the ground, you must have full throttle. But you can't keep it at that speed or the engine will burn out. When the plane reaches cruising altitudes, you pull back a little bit. This is the way sales careers go. At a certain point, you have to take off at full throttle and get to the height where you cruise for a while. The most important thing to remember is to keep your fuel levels high and stay pointed in the right direction.