Remember Our Roots! --by Michael S. Finn I know there is a New World Order in timesharing. We are big business, corporate, Wall Street and dare I say reputable. As I have said before, growth is great, but we must remember our roots: above all we sell vacations! How much more fun can that be? Imagine if we were selling insurance or investments or even gravesites. Now those guys need a vacation! Well, we get to sell it to them. So why don't we enjoy the ride? As most of you know this business is full of highs and lows; longevity lies in the consistency of it all. Isn't it great to wake up in the morning and look forward to your day at work? This is what our business is all about. We sell vacations, how much better can it get? I was once browsing through a bookstore, when I saw a book titled "Do What You Love and the Money will Come". Well I did not have to buy the book to know the premise. It is a valuable lesson. If your desire in life is to be a journalist or a mortician (I will end the funeral references there) you should go full force ahead and the money level will rise to your commitment. Selling vacations should come easy; everybody wants one-- don't you? I have worked with great salespeople and marketers. And the greatest of them have had a yearning to enjoy their job and help their clients get good value for their vacation dollar. They wanted to work every day. I would have salespeople waiting an hour after the line closed, on the off chance that a guest was late and they could get another shot at a sale. I had one of my top performers who would take her own time to create a discount restaurant program for her own and everyone else's owners. I had sales managers and executives alike who would spend their spare time just helping their owners get the vacation of their dreams. If you enjoy what you are doing, you take care of the little things and the big things take care of themselves. Make a commitment to your career! It will pay dividends. All the best sales and marketing people have one thing in common; they wake up in the morning and look forward to the day. They want a preview guest and more importantly they want to meet a new owner. More appropriately, they expect the sale and they have fun doing it. When I hire a new sales or marketing person, I tell them two things. "The more fun you have the more money you make and the more money you make the more fun you have." It is that simple. Then why are we not having more fun? Are we too corporate and mature in business? I don't think so. Corporations and big business were attracted to how we did business. We had large profit margins and payoffs on real estate within years, not decades. We did that by having some of the best performers in sales and marketing who wanted to have fun and succeed every day. I believe that there are some great advantages that brands and large real estate companies have brought to us as an industry. One thing large corporations have brought to us is a strong adherence to budgets. But while there is always merit to budgets, they can also blind us and even demotivate us. I have seen people more consumed with budgets than with making profits or more sales. Also, budgets can be set unrealistically high to make a program look better, when a more realistic budget was not only attainable but motivates the team to succeed and leads to higher yields in the long run. Now let's look at this on a personal basis. Let's say you are a salesperson who has a quota that includes six (6) sales this month and you have only two (2) sales with two days to go. Do you take two days off or mentally tank it? Personally I would want to work with the person who sees the next two days as an opportunity to double their monthly income. Sometimes you just get a little lucky, also. Maybe you take an extra tour who showed up late. Or you help an owner who decides to upgrade or offer up more referral tours. These are the differences between thirty five thousand a year sales execs and one hundred thousand dollar a year sales execs. The choice is yours and it's always the little things that matter. Make them count for you.

More Finn | Home Michael S. Finn, RRP, writes an insightful bi-weekly column regarding issues of ethical and profitable sales & marketing. Read his bio here Email: Michaelsfinn@aol.com Published on Mondays.

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