Jeffrey Gitomer

If your emails are getting deleted or not getting returned, or you’re playing a numbers game (sending 1,000 – hoping for a few random responses), you’re probably also blaming the recipient or the Internet for the lack of response.

I’m writing on writing. It’s the core of my success. This article is the second part of a short course on how I write for each area of my outreach.

My secret to writing is not complex: I write like I talk. Writing in “speak” makes several things easy:

I was walking in the parking lot of my local Starbucks with Gabrielle, my 2-year-old daughter, in my arms, when a guy came over and started to talk to me. He told me he’d seen me give two different seminars several years ago and asked, “Hey, do you still do seminars?”

Can you recite your mission statement?

Come on! You’ve seen it a hundred times, maybe a thousand times. It’s some drivel about being number one, exceeding expectations, and building shareholder value that contains other nonsensical words that mean nothing to anyone except the marketing people who dreamed it up one afternoon.

I get a ton of emails from people seeking insight or asking me to solve sales dilemmas. Here are a few that may relate to your job, your life, and most important, your sales thought process right now:

More than a celebration of achievement, I am celebrating the MILESTONE of my 1,000th weekly column. Milestones are NOT goals, they’re journeys. Mine started on March 22, 1992.

Think about the last 25 sales you DIDN’T make. What happened? Why didn’t you make them? Did you study the problem, or just blame the symptoms?

On March 2, 1962, an unbreakable basketball record was set. I’m a Wilt Chamberlain fan. I have been since the late 1950s. Please don’t confuse this article as just a tribute to the late, great Wilt Chamberlain. Rather, it’s a commentary on setting standards, breaking records, and the ability to have so much skill that the rules are changed to level the playing field. That’s what Wilt Chamberlain was to basketball. What standards have you set?

At every seminar I give, I ask my audience, “How many of you would like to write a book?” The majority of the audience raises their hand. And I follow on by stating, “Keep your hand up if you already have the first chapter written.” Almost every hand goes down. One or two hands out of a thousand will remain up.