You want to be a top producer, but you're stuck where you are and you don't know how to get any better. You've done what you were supposed to do, but you aren't moving up. You're frustrated and exhausted and you realize you don't know what you don't know. As long as you continue to do what you're doing now you'll stay stuck and frustrated. The very success that got you where you are today now has you trapped at that level.

You aren't happy where you are, but you've grown complacent and you aren't working hard to move up. You're in the danger zone. When you're in the danger zone you don't know what you don't know, and you aren't actively working to get to the next level.

Top producers understand that if you aren't moving forward you're moving backward. Once you start that backward slide it's ten times harder to regain momentum than it is to keep momentum going. You may be surprised to learn that top producers spend a great deal of time focusing on improving the fundamentals of sales and marketing. You may be even more surprised to learn that top producers don't do the things that industry experts tell them to do, and they don't do those things for very good reason. The best of the best don't cold call either face-to-face or via the phone, they don't use canned marketing communications, and they never waste their time networking where the scavengers network. They didn't become the best of the best because anyone handed them any breaks. They got there by learning from people outside their industry.

Why would they turn to people outside their industry for help when they could tap into the top producers in their industry? If you think about it for more than a few seconds the answers become obvious: the best doers aren't necessarily the best coaches and mentors, the best aren't likely to want to share their secrets and have you directly competing with them, and even if you tried to clone them it wouldn't necessarily work for you because you aren't the same people.

Top producers realize you can't reach the top by copying someone else. You need to follow and understand a sales system, but the purpose of a sales system is to keep you focused on the prospect. When you stay focused on the prospect you can help them buy.

One of the most important things a top producer understands is that you have to stop selling. If you want to sell you have to stop selling. To do that you have to learn how to help people buy. Helping people buy is harder than selling, but the results are much better. The reason most people focus on selling is because it takes work to learn how to help people to buy. But top producers aren't afraid to work on things that have a high pay-off. And they are averse to lots of activity that produce little. And isn't that what you're doing?