Archives for June 2017

You ask the same questions … you get the same answers …and then wonder why you don’t seem to grow as a salesperson fast enough. Sounds like a variation on the definition of insanity. However, if you ask a question you never asked before, you will get to a place you have never been before. You will open up new avenues of discussion. You may disrupt the thinking of the prospect. You will be out of your comfort zone. You will get information you have never gotten before. You will get new insights. You will learn new things about the business you are in. You will have to think on your feet. And you will most likely differentiate yourself and your product or service from the competition. So go ahead, ask that question you have been afraid to ask in the past.

If you do the discovery phase of the sales call properly, the prospect will be opening up and divulging his or her personal problems with the business issue under discussion. If you get excited at this stage of the process, you will turn off your prospect. It will raise doubts about your motivation, possibly expose your self-interest, and believe your claim to just be there to help them. You should adopt the demeanor of a doctor in the diagnosis phase of a health checkup. You would be disconcerted, to say the least, if the doctor excitedly announced that you had a rare disease and she was thrilled to have the chance to work on you since it was very lucrative for her and very interesting and she might even get a research paper out of it. Have your excitement for after you leave the prospects’s office.

A sales goal without a sales activity plan does not have much chance of being accomplished. In any other field a goal without a plan would be ludicrous. Would you have a goal to build a building without a couple of hundred drawings and a construction schedule? Would you plan a concert without a play list? Would you just start writing source code because you had a goal to develop a new app without a flow chart? OF COURSE NOT … unless you have money to burn and time to waste. So why do 98% of sales people set sales goals without planning out how many sales calls they need to make weekly to accomplish that goal? So I encourage you to stop reading this and estimate how many calls you need to make weekly to hit your sales goals … then keep track weekly. If your estimates are correct and you do the work, you will hit the sales goal.

To focus means to narrow your scope of attention. “Focusing on 7 things” is impossible under that definition. Spreading your attention between 7 things or even as many as 3 things will cause you to be ineffective and waste a lot of time. It is far more effective to focus on one item, get it done or moved along to the next step then “focus” on the next item on the list. The reason it is more effective to concentrate is that switching back and forth causes you to have to re-start or re-center your thinking every time your focus is moved from one task to the next. In sales trying to make a cold call here and another one there will waste many minutes and hours in your week as you have to gear yourself up each time to make the call. The solution is to dedicate significant blocks of time where you can focus on one task and move it along to a logical stopping point or to a point that something real and lasting is accomplished before you let yourself be distracted by another task.