You want success? Ditch the gimmicks

First, a thing I want on the record: I have nothing to sell you. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing. I only have something to share with you, and the reason I care whether you follow along is that it tells me what I am giving away is actually useful.

Now, the question that came in: what are the sales trends for this year? I do not want to be mean-spirited, because I am not that kind of guy, but I am pretty crass, so here is the answer. Get off the gimmicks. There is this thing called hard work.

Trends are fashion

If you are basically a good person, and you work hard, and you develop a standard way of running your business, and you make that way duplicatable, written down so others can follow it, you will succeed. You do not need a gimmick.

Sure, watch the trends. Are people buying more purple than brown this season? Fine, that is a fashion question, and fashion always changes. But underneath the fashion, a sound business barely changes at all. Look at my world: electricity is made today almost exactly the way it has always been made, and natural gas comes from where it has always come from. What makes the difference year after year is not a trend. It is running the sales force well, so more customers keep choosing us. That part never goes out of style.

You have a product or a service too, and I have to imagine it is not reinventing itself every minute. So build on the part that does not change. If your whole business depends on finding this year's angle, you do not have a business. You have a hobby with expenses.

The telephone on my desk

Somebody gave me a gift this past holiday: an old Bell telephone, the classic kind. I laughed when I opened it, because a phone that looked exactly like that is the tool I built my whole living on, going back to when I was eighteen years old.

I would take a product or a service, pick up that phone, and dial. I could read an area code and a prefix and tell you what part of which city I was calling. I made so many phone calls it would bend your mind. No funnel hacks, no secret formulas. A phone, a script, and the willingness to show up at the job, hunker down, and get something done that day. Right then. Right now.

That is the gimmick, if you insist on having one: you, improving. You showing up. Not something flashy that is going to wow them once and evaporate.

The boring formula that actually works

Here is the formula, and I apologize in advance for how boring it is. Show up and get something done today. Keep your personal integrity in, because integrity is a personal thing and nobody can hold it for you. Organize the steps inside your company, written policy, standard ways of doing things, so other people can genuinely help you get the work done. Then do all of that again tomorrow.

If you want to call that a gimmick, go ahead. But it is a simple truth, and it is available to absolutely everyone, which is exactly why nobody wants it. A secret angle flatters you. A standard week just works.

Done over and over and over, that brings success. And guys, this is not a theory. I am a living example of exactly that, and I have done it multiple times, and I am still doing it, all over the world. Watch me.

By the way, do you know what the date is? Almost half the first month of the year is already gone. Gone. The trend report will not save those days, and it will not save the next ones either. Showing up will. Get off the gimmicks and go to work.