This week I have the special opportunity to review Go for No!, written by Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz and the tenth of fifty-two books in the 52 Personal Development Books in 52 Weeks series.

Setting “No” Goals

The final chapters are definitely more applicable to salespeople. They deal extensively around setting goals to increase the number of “no’s” or rejections you receive on a day to day basis. The theory is, by focusing on hitting your “no” goals, you look forward to failure (which is a good thing if you read yesterday’s post) and as a result you’ll actually have more success.

The reason is, most salespeople focus on their “quota” that must be met for that month, week, or day. When that quota is reached, the average salesperson slows down knowing they are now “safe” because they’ve reached their goal. Excellence in salesmanship is never reached this way. Instead, when one focuses on increasing the number of rejections or “no’s”, they will as a direct result increase their rate of success and thereby improve their overall performance.

Can we apply this to general personal development? Absolutely. Let’s take weight lifting for example. I recently finished the Body for Life program. In the weight-lifting portion of the program, one of the key factors is trying to hit your point of failure. Muscle, when pushed to failure, will by necessity adapt and grow. Although difficult, if you can frequently hit those absolute failure points in your workout, your progress will be much greater then simply hitting your repetition and weight “quota”. So making a goal to increase the number of failure points in your workout will be very beneficial to your increased improvements.

Obviously this doesn’t have universal applications. For example if you’re trying to quit smoking, then going for failure — by increasing the amount of cigarettes you smoke — will be counterproductive. However, it applies perfectly to sales. And I don’t mean just for salespeople. This could be applied to selling your own business plan, to selling personal services, to increasing your referrals if you’re involved with network marketing (like Agloco for example ) and so on. If their is anything that you’re trying to “sell” then going for no is a great strategy.

So what ever happened to Eric Bratton? Did he ever return home? Did he take the lessons he learned from his alter ego and create for himself a successful life? I don’t want to spoil the ending so you’ll have to read the book to find out for yourself…

Go for No! is the tenth of fifty-two books in Life Training – Online’s series 52 Personal Development Books in 52 Weeks.