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      Knowledge

      Knowledge means knowing the product you are selling in depth – knowing more about it than your customers do so you can educate them. For salespeople, it means having information not only about their own product and its underlying technology, but also about measurement and data analysis, about marketing and advertising, about a customer’s business, and about competitive media. Chapters 15 through 24 will cover these knowledge areas.

      Opportunities

      Opportunities are the circumstances in which you can use your tools – attitude, skills, and knowledge. Even if you have the tools and know how to use them, you cannot accomplish anything unless you have opportunities to put them to use. Salespeople may have a positive attitude, the skills to solve problems, and a storehouse full of product, marketplace, and competitive knowledge, but if they do not make sales calls and find the right prospective customers, they will lack the opportunities to put their skills and knowledge to work.

      Preparation

      Therefore, depending on the situation, the amount of time to spend preparing for a one‐hour sales call or for an important formal presentation can range from six hours to six days.

      All of the students were talented enough to get into the elite Berlin school. Thus, the only noticeable difference in the students was not inherent talent but the amount of time they had practiced. This research and other credible research came to the conclusion that in order to be a true expert a person has to have 10 years or 10,000 hours of practice, of preparation.

      Also in 2008, another book, Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World‐Class Performers from Everybody Else, by Geoff Colvin referred to the same research conducted at the Berlin Academy of Music. But Colvin wrote in more detail about the ten‐years‐or‐thousand‐hours rule and not only emphasized the importance of practice in developing expert performance, but also the necessity of that practice being well structured and highly repetitive – deliberate. Colvin quoted from the seminal research article on deliberate practice, “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance” by K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch‐Romer:

      Deliberate practice is specifically designed to improve performance, not on an element of performance that a person is necessarily good at or likes, but one that is necessary to achieve expertise. And that particular performance element might not be fun, which is all the better, because the person doing it has to think about executing, has to concentrate, and, therefore, the practice does not become thoughtlessly automatic.

      So, if you want to become an expert performer in media selling, you need to develop the discipline to prepare thoroughly, both short‐term preparation and long‐term preparation through deliberate practice.

      Persistence

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