Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said, “Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all-the-time thing...” The same thing can be said of selling. Selling is not a sometime thing; it’s an all-the-time thing. You don’t sell once in a while; you don’t sell on some calls and not on others; you sell on all your calls. Professional selling is a habit. Unfortunately, so is order-taking.
You do not have to reinvent the formulas for winning or selling. Just find out what they are and model them. Both formulas have in common a key ingredient: Practice. Professionals in any arena spend time practicing. The greats spend more time practicing than they do performing.Practice is not fun, but as Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers, “To be great at what you do requires that you work harder in practice and in follow through than those you compete with. It is done on your own and not in the main arena or under the spotlight.”
You measure winning by the results, not by the effort. If the result you want to deliver is delighted customers, you will have to use their measuring tool. Only your customer can tell you whether you are delivering solutions to their problems and truly taking care of them.
Making sales call doesn’t make money. Making sales makes money. That is why the professional is prepared and asks for an order on every call. With the goal of writing an order on every sales call clearly understood, the winner is prepared to do what, when, where and how to serve their customer or client.
Winners spend quality time in preparation for each customer or client contact. The pre-call preparations help identify what it takes to make your customer more productive and their job less stressful.
Winning is in direct proportion to practice and Professionals invest a lot of time in preparation and practice. Here are five things winners practice:
Practice starting today. Today is the day to begin to get better. There is no better time than the present. So heed the words of Robin Williams in the movie, Dead Poets Society, “Carpe Diem” —seize the day.
Practice in the present to guarantee the future. College football teams practice Monday thru Friday for the big game on Saturday. The better they practice during the week the better they perform at kickoff time. Practicing in the present helps create your profitable tomorrow.
Practice your sales call. You have heard that it’s not practice that makes you perfect, but perfect practice that makes you perfect. Practice will improve anyone. Often this will not be fun. And most often it is done in solitude. As Marshal Matt Dillon described his job on the popular radio show, Gun Smoke, “It’s a chancy job and you get lonely.” Practice may be lonely, but it helps eliminate the uncertainty in your job. You practice for one reason: to be great at what you do.
Practice the “five minute / three question reflective moment.” After every sales call you make, take five minutes to honestly review what you did or did not accomplish and what you will do on the next call to be more effective. Ask and answer these three questions: 1. What did I do that contributed to building my relationship? 2. What did I do that inhibited building my relationship? 3. How do I improve next time? Focus on learning from your mistakes and successes. This short reflective moment can help improve your ability to close future sales and remain a winner.
Practice is hard and it’s not fun. If winning were easy, almost everyone would be a winner. But winners are a step or two ahead of the pack. They do the things that the crowd is unwilling to do. They spend hours deliberately practicing those activities or actions that improve performance in their specific occupation. When asked about his practice routine, golfing great, Gary Player said, “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.” Practice is hard, but it is a difference maker.
Instead of looking at practice as a chore, winners challenge themselves to view it as a self-improvement exercise; a review of the “game film” or an After Action Review. In practice, you are working out the kinks and building winning muscle before the curtain rises on opening day. Look at practice as a dry run or “Off Broadway” presentation.
HOG THOUGHT: Winning is like losing—it is the end game. People remember winners and quickly forget losers. Organizations reward winners and fire losers. The problem with many people is that they are good losers instead of being great winners. Great winners never get comfortable. They use great practice sessions to help them become better, stay ahead of the competition, and be more successful. Great practice enables ordinary people do extraordinary things.
HOG QUOTE: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” — Malcolm Gladwell, author, Outliers
HOG ACTION: You can choose to practice or not practice. The outcome of your choice is not yours. Therefore, practice.
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