Okay, you’re in sales. You have a decent base salary and a good but normal incentive and commission plan. You know, not Beverly Hills real estate commission money. Not Wall Street money, but the kind of money you make as a regular good salesperson. If you hit all your numbers, if you make your forecast, you can pull in about a quarter of a million this year.

Good money right? So you work hard, you do everything you can to make your numbers. Or at least you do what you’ve always done.

You develop a strong lead generation plan.

You find and target the accounts. The right accounts.

If you score those accounts you will indeed make your forecast.

In other words you do what you’ve been taught to do. You do everything you know how to do and you do it with as much intensity as you’ve always had at your job.

It’s all good solid work. Nothing extraordinary.

And I know you won’t make it. You might come close some years but hey, $175K is a damn good salary right? Even $140K or $130K, that will be good enough for you. Sure you agreed to that number that the boss suggested (well, kind of demanded) but you both know that you aren’t going to make that top line number. And that’s good enough. As long as you come close you’ll still have your job. Heck, it’s only in a blue moon that someone actually makes their forecast, never mind exceeds it.

It’s just some kind of game you and your boss do every year. In his heart he knows what you’re really good for and already counts on that being the number.

Now let me ask you this. Did you really do everything you could possibly do? Did you work as hard as possible? I mean really hard, like 14 hours a day. Can you say that at the end of the day, the week, the month and the year that you left everything on the field? Are you sure?

How creative were you? Is there anything you came up with this year that you had never done before? Did you spend hours in the night coming up with ideas that would really change the game? Something that no one you know in sales has ever done.

When you look in the mirror in the morning or better yet at night can you honestly say that you have done everything that you could think to do?

Okay where am I going with this? What am I trying to get you to think about?

Give up? It’s this. Realistically speaking most of us in sales do the same thing month after month, year after year without changing a thing. We do things the way we learned to do them in our first years in sales. The only difference is how much we work and the luck factor. Did we get a little luckier this year? Other than that it is the same thing, the same process and the same methodology that we have been using forever nothing ever changes in the way we do things.

I’ll ask you one last time. Are you sure, absolutely sure, that you are doing all you possibly can to be as successful as you can possibly be?

And if your answer is yes, then let me ask you this:

What if I told you that if you made your forecast this year your bonus would be one million dollars. That’s it, all you have to do is make your forecast. That forecast that you and your boss agreed to. That’s all you have to do and at the end of the year you will be presented with a check for a million dollars!

Now let’s go back to the beginning. What would you do then? What would you do to make that million dollars?

Let’s dream for a minute. What would a million dollars mean to you and your family? What could you do with that money? Think of the security that money would bring to your house. Think about what you could do with that. Think about how it would make you feel to earn that money. Why it might make you feel like…well like a million bucks!

Now get back to reality. You have been given the chance, the opportunity to make a million dollars this year. It is now entirely up to you. If you come up with a plan, if you think of new and creative ways to find the right customers, the ones that can help you earn that million bucks you could make that money.

Okay now that the opportunity to earn a million dollars in a single year is a reality, what are you going to do?

Here is what I ask you to do. Think seriously about what you would do. The actions you would take. The number of hours you would work. To do whatever it took to earn that million dollars. Go ahead, take your time. Got it? Have you figured out what you would do and how you would do it? Great, now write it down on a piece of paper. Fold that paper and put it in your pocket and keep it there as a reminder. Read it every single day. AND GO DO IT! It’s only common sense.