Preparation and Great Practice Lead to Winning #42

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.

The Sales Goals Tell What We Want To Happen

The sales goals tell what we want to happen. But the weekly sales report tells what is happening. The difference between the two is a measurement defined as a, “Gap.” The gap itself may be narrow or it may be broad; it is either positive or negative. Exceeding your goal produces a positive deviation; not achieving the goal produces a negative deviation. The former is good; the latter, not good. Hogs with positive deviations are called, Performers. Those with negative deviations are classified as Underperformers.

Identifying the negative deviation is important because people who are aware of a problem are able to make adjustments—just like a sports team at halftime—to continually improve themselves.

Denial of a negative deviation or shifting the blame to another source or cause is unproductive and leads to continued failure. This is called the Law of the Victim. “My poor performance is the result of ‘them’ setting my goals too high.” “My competition has advantages that I don’t.” “My competitor’s prices are lower.” “I can’t get anyone to help me.” “My market is different.” All of these excuses have one thing in common, the problem is always the result of someone else’s actions or inactions; never caused by the hog with the problem. You may have to look hard but you won’t have to look far for the reason you are failing. A wise person once said, “Few blame themselves until they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

Frustration and irritation will not close the gap. Only focus and tenacity can do that. When ask for his secret of success, Louis Pasteur said, “Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.” When tempted to give in, Pasteur hung tight and finally through his perseverance and determination developed the small pox vaccine. “The difficulties and struggles of today,” promised J. H. Boetcker, “are but the price we must pay for the accomplishments and victories of tomorrow.”

To be a Victor rather than a Victim, a hog must be hognacious. All decisions, activities and actions must be focused on achieving the goal. Ken Blanchard, co-author of “The One Minute Manager” wrote, “The Things that get worked on first tend to get fixed first.” This being true, the question is, what needs to be fixed first to achieve your goals? What have you been working on that will help you close the performance gap and bring you closer to being a Hogdacious Performer?

HOG THOUGHT: In contemplating adjustments and changes, you may want to consider the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen. Kaizen is about the ability to make incremental improvements in processes every day. When applied to sales people, Kaizen activities continually improve from planning to presentation and from attitudes to values. By improving their selling activities, Kaizen aims to make happen what we want to happen.

HOG QUOTE: “It is not where you are today that counts. It is where you’re headed.” — Arthur F. Lenehan

HOG ACTION: Clearly define your goal and you will have no trouble judging what activities fit with your goal and which don’t.

One Hog, One Action Can Make A Difference

When I lived and worked in South Florida I would often drive by “Butterfly World.” This tourist attraction houses several beautiful gardens and is home to thousands of colorful butterflies. People pay $14 to view the flowers and butterflies.

Though I never stopped and toured Butterfly World, it reminds me of a concept called, “The Butterfly Effect.” This theory says that a butterfly flapping its wings in Peking, China contributes to the tornado in Lawrence, Kansas. In other words, small causes have large consequences. This suggests that every individual person (a butterfly) can influence major complex systems. One person can make a difference.

If one person can make a difference, can one act also make a difference? Why not test the idea? Decide each morning this week that you are going to sell something to each person you call on that day.

At your first stop, ask for an order; at the next stop, ask for an order, and so on throughout the day. Each additional sale will have a “butterfly effect” on your total sales for the day, the week, the month, the year. It will also have a positive effect on your paycheck.

No matter the day, no matter the customer, always ask for the order. Sell something on every sales call. That’s why it’s called a “Sales Call.” Keep in mind the challenging words Robin Williams said to his students in the movie, "Dead Poets Society," Carpe Diem, seize the day!

HOG THOUGHT: If you are not actively involved in earning as much as you want, you don’t really want much. Increased earnings require increased actions.

HOG QUOTE: “The difficult we can do right now, the impossible takes a little longer.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower

HOG ACTION: Do something right now that will help you achieve your goals. Prove the “Butterfly Effect.”