Please Stop the Whining !

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Fri, Oct 22, 2010

It’s bad enough that we need to listen to the politicians attack one another and tell us all of the negatives that their opponents are doing/have done. What I don’t want to hear is whining and complaining from underperforming salespeople in the 4th quarter about “how tough it is out there”, or that “our prices are too high”.

With a maximum of 46 selling days left in the year, there’s simply no room for excuses, whining and complaining. Success now is all about blocking and tackling, making progress down the field, moving from down to down and pushing ahead to make more goals. Using the football analogy, obviously no team would be going into a game this weekend without a well detailed game plan. The question that every sales manager should be asking is whether he or she is requiring that same level of planning of themselves and of their salespeople? And if you’re not, why? It make no sense not to do require detailed quarterly plans.

Very simply, this is not a time for whining, or, quite frankly, any negative thoughts since they just slow you down and all of the players around you. For every whine, you should counter with the hard facts:

Whine: “Nobody’s buying”
Reality: 65% of sales’ time is spent not selling

Whine: “Our price is too high”/”Everyone’s dropping their price”
Reality: 90% of marketing’s pricing deliverables are not used by Sales

Whine: “We’re not getting enough/any good leads”
Reality: The ability to contact a lead decreases dramatically after just 5 minutes. In 30 minutes, the likelihood plummets 100x.

The reality is that true success in sales has to do with highly developed and trained skills, positive attitude, effective marketing tools and well developed quarterly plans…just like in football.

Good Selling!

Tags: sales productivity, sales management, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, improved sales management, Sales quota