High Performance Sales | Blog

The life of a sales professional is a busy one, juggling prospecting activities, managing your sales funnel, traveling, growing existing customers, and handling administrative demands. Many sales professionals have the chance to earn a very high income, because if they get all of this right, it should absolutely be rewarded – this is NOT easy work.

What do I know for sure about human behavior? The longer we do anything, the less likely we are to step back, take a few needed moments to prepare, or practice. Think about it this way. How many things do we do each day that if we were asked to do them differently, we would just get angry? Would you be angry if you were made to drive on the left side of the road? Would you get angry if you were told to text with one hand only and the letters on the keyboard were in different places? Would you get mad if Starbucks changed the names of their drinks to ENGLISH and not Starbuckian and had all new drink options on the list? The answer to each question is likely YES.

Look at NFL coaches on the sidelines. They have on their headsets and are holding a huge laminated document that has something very important on it… the game plan with many options, depending upon what they are facing at that particular moment. Why? Because they are prepared and have already spent the time to get ready for the game.

How can we instill this game planning discipline in our sellers, whether they are new or seasoned?

Aesop’s Fables are believed to date as far back as 5^th or 6^th century BC.  The oldest fairy tales were believed to have been told and retold for generations before they were ever written down.  Meanwhile, my clients struggle daily with trying to get their customers to remember their sales pitch 10 minutes after they pull out of the parking lot.

Yes, that is a quote from a funny Jackie Chan movie. However, it has real meaning in professional sales. Stop and think about the amount of hours and weeks that are burned preparing for strategic sales calls. Sales reps, sales leaders, marketing departments and top executives pour their souls into very important selling opportunities.

This is the right thing to do. Companies absolutely should invest heavily in the right selling opportunities. What might need some attention? Planning the dialogue and that means planning the “words that are coming out of my mouth right now.” We have to leave time for planning and practice. 

 I was conducting some sales training this past week and I said something at the end of the two-day session that gave me pause. It sounded like it came from a Fortune Cookie or maybe some sort of self-help bumper sticker.

Have you ever sat through a meeting and felt like the team accomplished NOTHING?  Frustrating, isn’t it? Because your people’s time is a valuable asset and one of your top expenses, it is extremely important to optimize the productivity of your meetings. If you effectively facilitate your team meetings, your team will not only accomplish more, but they will also respect you more as their leader.

 Last week I finished No Easy Day, the controversial book written by one of the Navy SEALs involved in the bin Laden raid. It was a quick read, and for a few days I was engrossed in the life of a Navy SEAL… reading voraciously about how SEALs become SEALs, how they train, and how they prepare for missions.

The first 99.9% of human existence had no Microsoft word or PowerPoint presentations. We relied on seeing vs reading to make sense of the world around us. For most of our existence we were in a constant struggle between hunting to eat or being hunted and eaten. Our ability to size up a situation visually with everything seen together in context was the difference between life and death.