This week marks the official end to reacting to the recession. If you haven’t completed your whining, complaining, excuse making, sarcasm, finger pointing, justifying, rationalizing and everything else “if only”, you must have it completely out of your system by Wednesday or face a severe penalty.

Beginning Thursday, all salespeople will be required to have a positive attitude, take full responsibility for their actions and results, and work either three times harder, three times longer or have three times more opportunities in their pipeline to compensate for the times.

Not making as much money as two years ago? Here are several things you can do, right now, to get your income back where it was.

— stop accepting put-offs
— qualify more effectively
— do a better job finding their compelling reasons to buy
— don’t sell on price
— find the urgency and take advantage of it
— be more effective at finding, providing and presenting compelling needs and cost appropriate solutions
— differentiate
— book more new appointments
— ask better questions
— listen more effectively
— practice handling all of the economic objections
— practice the skills above
— hold yourself accountable to a higher level of performance
— acquire the attitude and determination of a top 5% performer
— overcome all remaining weaknesses that undermine and sabotage performance
— develop the skills above with a sales development, sales training or sales coaching program
–reread Baseline Selling for timely help on all of the points above.