It’s funny how things that cycle through the common wisdom of the times, and how each generation always has to go through a little process of reinventing the wheel to discover what works now is often very much like what worked before. In the early days of business training, we were taught to have a winning attitude, and that this was sometimes everything. It’s come around again this generation where that wisdom is coming back into vogue, and of course, it never really left, but just had to work its way into the language again.
There are often times when things work so well for so long, that we decide collectively that there must be ways of improving on what we know to be true. That’s always a genuinely good-intentioned assumption, but it never goes very far before we start looking deeply at the complexity of our times, to try to find some hidden patterns that we didn’t see before, in order to gain some kind of new wisdom for what we need to do to make things work. It does seem as though this always results in discovering, somewhere along the way, that there is no new wisdom at all, but the lessons of the past are still relevant to our times. Perhaps the only new wisdom, then, is that the old wisdom works, and that’s why it’s called wisdom to begin with.
Because there are so many new ideas, it’s always beneficial to learn the basics, and to keep refreshing ourselves on these, so that we can remain solid in what we do. And there certainly have been new lessons to learn in how the basics work, and that’s one reason why sales process improvement comes with immersing ourselves in the traditions and techniques that have always made great salespeople who they are. A winner’s edge in this day and age may have some new accessories, but the heart of the attitude is still very much the same, and very much worth cultivating at every turn along the way.
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