Description - Prima Donnas

Description

A prima donna is a very temperamental person with an inflated view of their own talent or importance. If you are the top sales rep on your team you can claim you’re a prima donna, if not you can’t. Park your ego at the door.

Transcription

Let’s talk about pre Madonna’s and know it all reps. Fundamentally, the situation is this. Sales is difficult, you get a lot of rejection. So, most reps overcompensate and they start, it’s bravado. They go out there and they’re, I know this and I know that because any flaw is an attack on their ego and an attack on their ego is an attack on their very existence.

Okay? So I was a prima donna, but I was a prima donna after I was the number one rep out of the whole year, not a month, out of 350. But then I didn’t care. You know, I just wanted the money. A prima donna, you know, what does that mean? The other thing is that being a prima donna has some advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages are you don’t have to take any crap from bosses or anybody else because they have, they need you bad. You’re, you’re booking too many deals. For instance, when I was with all data earlier in my career. And I was the number one rep. I was literally 10 percent of the company’s sales. One rep.

They used to have charts and sales progress and projections and they used to take and eliminate me because I was skewing the results too much. It’s like having once a 200, 000 house and then a 1 million house. The average is meaningless at that point. So I enjoyed that part of it. It was nice. I mean, I could do what I want.

I told my boss, you know, that he wanted to come and visit me, uh, he was out of state And, uh, I told him that’s okay. You don’t need to come up here. You know, I’m good. It’s not really. I want to visit you to see how things are going. I said, it’s fine. But if you want to go on a call with me, there’s one rule.

Don’t talk, don’t screw up my deals. Don’t say anything. You can watch me, but don’t say anything. Cause you don’t know how to sell. I do. That’s what I told the guy. He laughed and said, okay, it came out. It worked out pretty good. He was smart enough, you know, not to mess it up, you know, and, uh, but a lot of reps are pre McDonald’s before they earn it.

And they come in, they’re all Top Gun, hot shot, da da da da da, you know. And maybe they had a big success in their last job. But this is a new job, they haven’t earned that yet, here, okay? On a new job. So, basically, that kind of attitude just makes people dislike you. Or at best, they’re jealous of you if you’re in a Top Gun.

But, you know, what does that buy you? You know, that and a dollar gets you a cup of coffee, if you go on a time machine back in 1960. So, prima donna, the whole concept is, you know, don’t act like that. Don’t be the prima donna, just keep your expertise to yourself, and go out and just, you know, make deals happen and make them money, okay?

Being strutting around like that doesn’t matter, okay? Which is, you know, the relative thing is know it alls, know it alls, know it alls. It’s just that simple. Whatever they learned in the past, and now they think they’re done, they know everything. Well, at that point, you stop learning. And you start falling behind.

Okay. You’re not trainable. So I used to tell ’em, I go, you, you seem like you know a lot about sales. Oh yeah, I know this. That’s great. So here’s the deal. My training is optional and so are the meetings. If you don’t wanna attend meetings, you don’t have to. And if you don’t, uh, need any assistance, you don’t have to have that, okay?

No training? Great. But you have to put up the deals. If you can promote the deals, you can do whatever you want. I don’t really care. I’ll spend my time with the other reps who aren’t producing as much. Okay? But if you’re not gonna turn in deals and you’re not going to training, you’re fired. I don’t need you hanging around and messing things up.

Most of the time, you would think that, Oh, okay, I’ll go, I’ll go to the training, I’ll just in case. No, no, no, they know it all, they’re egomaniacs. What they would do is they would go out, they would fail selling and then they would quit. Instead of asking for help, and they would quit, have to start all over again from that other job, okay?

And because their ego, is uncontrollable. Okay. If you live with your ego mind, any perceived threat, the subconscious mind perceives that as a life or death situation. It’s not rational. Your left brain knows the situation is not life or death, but your right brain, your subconscious mind, thinks it’s under attack.

And we’ll do anything to, uh, prevent that attack, okay? And that’s why the bravado is there. They have to boast and brag and talk like a big shot. Constantly reinforce the ego mind. Someone who’s not living out of the ego mind will say, you know, I’ve been selling for a long time, but I’m always, you know, willing to learn more.

You know, there’s all these things I can’t prove. I want to make money, you know, I’m not here to impress you guys. I’m here to make money or I’ll quit go somewhere else. Okay, so they’ll they’ll remember what they learned and they’ll compare it against the situation They’re in right now And they’ll say you know what some of the things I was doing before this other job aren’t applicable here They’re not working for me.

So maybe I should seek out some other opinions, right? From other reps or a manager or whatever. And those are the ones who inevitably inevitably rise to the top rank of the reps because they’re, they’re just not driven by ego and, uh, they don’t need to, to brag or boast anyway, that’s how that works.