What have you done for me lately? That seems to be the sales battle cry. A sales career can be one without progress. In every other profession, you start out near the bottom and work your way up. Not so much in sales. You may gain experience and product knowledge and be assigned larger accounts…and still be competing with kids right out of college. In other careers, experience leads to promotions, prestige and more money. In sales, you’re only as important as your last month of production.
In sales, your base salary will stay pretty much the same from the start of your career until the day you retire. The only increases you’ll see will be due to inflation. And, if you get a boost, you’ll be expected to sell more.
So, let’s say you have a run of success and you end up being top salesperson for eight straight months. You start feeling pretty darn good about yourself. You got a strut to your step, managers repeatedly use you as an example to your underperforming cohorts and gradually you start forming the opinion that odor and you are mutually exclusive. If you’re a man, every woman in the office smiles at you, if you’re a woman, you make all the male reps’ privates shrink.
Then a few things transpire, in descending order:
1. You lose some of your fire.
2. You start feeling pressure to stay on top.
3. You start looking for management to rescue you with a promotion.
You’re making money and you need time to spend it. You start shopping during work hours, eating lunch at nice restaurants and leaving work early on Fridays. You take more vacations. You start relying too heavily on your sales funnel and stop prospecting. All of a sudden sales aren’t pouring in as they used to. Some other sales rep’s totals start approaching your own. Pretty soon your manager starts asking you what’s going on, what you’ve been up to and how you’re going to fix things. You start feeling disrespected. You vow to work harder but you’ve developed bad habits that are difficult to correct. Your sales figures continue to dip and you start to lose confidence. As your confidence drops, you get nervous when you prospect; you put off callbacks and hesitate to close. You start to wonder if you lost confidence because you stopped selling or if you stopped selling because you lost confidence. Next thing you know, your manager starts talking about an action plan. Action plan? You were top rep, eight months in a row! You can’t believe you’re being treated with such contempt. You start looking for a new job but no one seems interested because they sense your desperation.
What happened?
You rested on your laurels. You started to believe that sales was something it isn’t and that your sales totals from one month would mean something months later. Instead of building on your efforts, you’re going to have to start all over again, with another organization. Hopefully you’ll be able to get the hunger to sell once again.
What to do?
Stay humble and hungry. Don’t look at sales reports or listen to managers. Don’t think you have some kind of special gift or that you were born to sell. Don’t get too high or too low, stay even keeled.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Be Like Lenny
Baseball is a sport that requires mental toughness. You can have all the talent in the world but if you can’t control your mind, you won’t be successful. The best baseball players fail 70% of the time. An At Bat can range from swinging and missing to fouling off a pitch, to stroking a single up the middle. You can hit a sharp line drive that‘s snagged by a baseman, or a weak floater that somehow drops in. Slumps can hit you like a disease; they’re consuming and the harder you try to overcome them, the more you’ll struggle.
To be a good hitter, you need to forget striking out the moment you start your walk back to the dugout. Players that don’t possess this ability are bound to fail. As a fan, you want to see your favorites fired up and competitive, but the best players stay cool and collected.
In Michael Lewis’ book, Money Ball, he describes two players, Billy Beane and Lenny Dykstra. Billy Beane was a five-tool player; he could run, throw, hit for power and average and field his position. But failures ate at Beane and baseball is a game of failure. Dykstra didn’t know any better. He was talented, but not like Beane. Self doubt wasn’t part of Dykstra’s make up and if he got one hit and struck out three times in a game, the only thing he remembered was the hit.(1)
In his book, Lewis described how a few Mets’ players were watching in awe as Hall of Fame pitcher, Steve Carlton warmed up. Carlton won over 300 games in his career and had one of the nastiest sliders in baseball history. Dykstra didn’t know who he was, and after being informed, he proclaimed, “Shit. I’ll stick him.”
What does this have to do with sales? Sales is like baseball. When you’re making calls and someone is rude to you, it’s like striking out in baseball. If the best baseball players fail 70% of the time, the best salespeople fail 75% of the time. And just as the best baseball players shrug off strike outs and errors, the best salespeople shrug off rejection.
If it’s Monday morning and you find out you lost a big sale, you got to forget about it and move forward, the same way a hitter needs to forget a 0 for. If you check out or take the rest of the day off, how many others sales are you affecting?
In baseball, if you start thinking of all the stuff stacked against you - fast balls, change ups, curve balls and sliders, all the fielders – you’re going to fail. The same thing is true in sales. If you start thinking about your competition, your pricing, whether or not people want to talk to you, no solicitation signs…you might as well stay home. Heck, if you were thinking of all those things, you already called in sick.
In sales, ignorance is bliss and introspective salespeople fall like flies. Enter a business or a call like you have the greatest news or the most valuable information to share. If you’re hung up on or asked to leave, don’t give it a second thought. If a potential customer calls to inform you that they decided to go another way, thank them for the opportunity and start looking for your next opportunity. Focus on success, strengths and acceptance, not failure, weaknesses and rejection.
Be like Lenny.
(1) Dykstra had the same mentality in the financial world and although it started out well, he lost everything, including his wife, and made a lot of enemies along the way.
To be a good hitter, you need to forget striking out the moment you start your walk back to the dugout. Players that don’t possess this ability are bound to fail. As a fan, you want to see your favorites fired up and competitive, but the best players stay cool and collected.
In Michael Lewis’ book, Money Ball, he describes two players, Billy Beane and Lenny Dykstra. Billy Beane was a five-tool player; he could run, throw, hit for power and average and field his position. But failures ate at Beane and baseball is a game of failure. Dykstra didn’t know any better. He was talented, but not like Beane. Self doubt wasn’t part of Dykstra’s make up and if he got one hit and struck out three times in a game, the only thing he remembered was the hit.(1)
In his book, Lewis described how a few Mets’ players were watching in awe as Hall of Fame pitcher, Steve Carlton warmed up. Carlton won over 300 games in his career and had one of the nastiest sliders in baseball history. Dykstra didn’t know who he was, and after being informed, he proclaimed, “Shit. I’ll stick him.”
What does this have to do with sales? Sales is like baseball. When you’re making calls and someone is rude to you, it’s like striking out in baseball. If the best baseball players fail 70% of the time, the best salespeople fail 75% of the time. And just as the best baseball players shrug off strike outs and errors, the best salespeople shrug off rejection.
If it’s Monday morning and you find out you lost a big sale, you got to forget about it and move forward, the same way a hitter needs to forget a 0 for. If you check out or take the rest of the day off, how many others sales are you affecting?
In baseball, if you start thinking of all the stuff stacked against you - fast balls, change ups, curve balls and sliders, all the fielders – you’re going to fail. The same thing is true in sales. If you start thinking about your competition, your pricing, whether or not people want to talk to you, no solicitation signs…you might as well stay home. Heck, if you were thinking of all those things, you already called in sick.
In sales, ignorance is bliss and introspective salespeople fall like flies. Enter a business or a call like you have the greatest news or the most valuable information to share. If you’re hung up on or asked to leave, don’t give it a second thought. If a potential customer calls to inform you that they decided to go another way, thank them for the opportunity and start looking for your next opportunity. Focus on success, strengths and acceptance, not failure, weaknesses and rejection.
Be like Lenny.
(1) Dykstra had the same mentality in the financial world and although it started out well, he lost everything, including his wife, and made a lot of enemies along the way.
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