As a rookie real estate agent I had the good fortune to spend a day with a true sales professional, a man who had risen up through the ranks of a Fortune 500 company to become head of a vast sales department with thousands of employees across the world. While showing him property, I decided to pick his brain for advice. I asked him what he thought was his greatest lesson learned over his long and prosperous career.

Without hesitating, he smiled and said, "Jim, I learned that to succeed in life you have to be able to find your coconut."

Okay, I thought to myself, that was a little weird. Sensing my confusion he went on to explain a sales theory that was truly unique.

Imagine for a moment that you are a vast land owner in Thailand. You own hundreds of acres of coconut trees and you must harvest them before the season ends. To get the job done you need to hire employees to do the picking.

My client then asked me, "Who would you hire?"

My first impulse was to hire local people in the town, but my client quickly shot that down, "They have higher paying jobs in the cities, so they wouldn't do it."

Digging deeper, I offered another suggestion, "How about bringing in workers from other areas?"

"Too expensive."

"What about hiring teenagers?"

"It's a full time job, and they have to go to school."

When I was out of suggestions, my client finally revealed what Thai farmers have been doing for generations. They use trained monkeys to climb up the trees to pick the fruits and bring them back down. Why use monkeys? Because the coconut trees are so tall it would be too tiring, time-consuming, and even dangerous for farmers to climb up the trees themselves, so they train monkeys to do the job for them.

He went on to explain that a well-trained monkey can pick hundreds of coconuts a day, all for just a few bananas and some affection. What's more is that if the Thai farmers were to pay their monkeys based on productivity most would earn a mid-level salary in Thailand.

"Now Jim, if that same monkey were earning a mid-level salary here in the US he would be beating 95 percent of the sales people in America, and you know why he would beat them?"

I didn't have a clue, but I have to admit I was now captivated by this crazy monkey story.

"Because those monkeys have figured out what most sales people never will -- How to earn a banana everyday."

It was such a perfectly simple story that I had to think about it for a minute to really grasp what he had just said. So I replayed it again in my mind until I thought I had figured it out.

"So what you're saying is that a great salesperson just needs to figure out what they need to do everyday to create a sale, and do those things over and over again, just like those monkeys picking the coconuts."

"Exactly. You see Jim, most salespeople ignore the fact that there are really just a few simple things that we all need to do everyday to create a sale. The bottom line is that salespeople find reasons to do everything else but pick coconuts."

So did you catch the moral of the story? To improve your productivity simply identify what it is that creates a sale and do that thing over and over again.

Published: June 17, 2005

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Jim Remley is a speaker, author, and consultant. He is also an active real estate broker in Southern Oregon where he owns a network of six offices. Jim won the Rookie Instructor of the Year award in 2001 from Realty-U, the largest network of real estate educators in the nation. He was the winner of the 2002 Pacesetter Award, and nominated for the Real Estate Instructor of the Year Award during the first quarter of 2003. To learn more about Jim, please visit ProPerformer.com or e-mail him at .