Gold’s Down $4.90? OMG!

Don’t watch the news.  Those TV producers make such a big deal out of every rise and fall in the price of gold, the Dollar, oil prices and the stock markets.  Why don’t they just show you a 30 or 90 day trend-line for these critical matrices?  Because if you looked at the more vitally important long term trends, you wouldn’t be shocked by these tiny blips.  Also, you wouldn’t feel the need to watch every day to see of that disconcerting 0.0002% drop would correct itself.

Don’t watch your daily sales.  If your performance bonuses or your employee reviews are weekly, monthly or quarterly then roughly half of your days will be above the trend and half will be below the trend.  The most productive way to improve your performance is to focus on selling techniques and the impact they have on individual transactions.  Pay attention to what’s working and what’s not.  Then when bonus or review time comes around you can look at your sales for the period and have a discussion about the experiences you’ve had and how you might change or augment your techniques for the next period.