In business and especially the sales business, you can learn a lot from an old hound dog.

When the dog is hunting he is focused and running hard and has one goal in mind. Get it. When that same dog is laying up on the porch of the hunting cabin he yawns and scratches at his fleas. The difference is when he is at idle, he is focused on his problems. The dog that is hunting never stops to scratch his fleas because he is fully engaged in hunting. In fact he doesn’t even know he has fleas until he is laying on the porch with nothing to do.

There have been many salesman over the years that could have been great but they never got off the porch. They were always complaining about something that wasn’t going their way and how someone hurt their feelings. You can see this in most office environments when everyone wants to meet and elect a committee and draft documents and analyze where everything is at.

Don’t get me wrong. Some meeting are very important. When the Army wants to meet before an attack, there is a good reason. What I am talking about is the need for meetings when we really need to be selling. John Galbraith said it so well when he said, “meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

Put yourself in the hound dog’s mind. He is the happiest when he is doing the thing he does best which is hunting and looking for birds or squirrels. He is the most unhappy when he is at idle and laying up on the porch with nothing to do. We as humans are a lot like dogs in that we need to be doing something to be happy and something we can feel a part of. It can be a job or volunteer work but we all need to be involved and to be in action mode versus porch mode.

Harmon Born once said, “The only way you can coast is downhill.” Isn’t that so simple to understand? So if you are in sales like I am, the most joy is when you are on a new deal, a new client, a new sale or a new idea. Wet wood will not burn and sometimes we just need to go get some fresh wood. Meaning, you can spend all your time trying to get some people to what you want to do but at some point you just need to go get some fresh wood. KT