Winning the Marathon; Winning in Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Wed, Apr 20, 2011

Boston Marathon 2011Boston is just a terrific city.  Small, easy to walk around, and one of the greatest sports towns in America.  The Patriots are either the Super Bowl Champs...or not; the Celtics are always the leaders and the Sox, well, that's another story given this year's opening season. 

But, one of the best things that we do in Boston is to host The Marathon!  With running an addictive sport, there are now hundreds and hundreds of marathons seemingly in every large city and small town in America, but there's is only one real marathon, and it's simply referred to by the elite runners as "Boston".

On Monday, I watched Geoffrey Mutai and the rest of the Kenyans with special pride having lived my post college years in East Africa, and on Monday, I was thinking about what it must take to go the distance.  Forget the fact that the Kenyans first need to overcome huge obstacles of poverty, limited to zero formal training, no $100 Nikes and a host of other obstacles.  And yet, year after year, they bring the very best runners in the world to Boston to race in the grandfather of all marathons.  

Tremendous dedication of personal time, explosive power in their energy, years of training, and just sheer determination on the part of these world class athletes is what makes watching the Marathon an inspiring event for me as I squeezed on to Boylston Street along with 50,000 others to watch the best of the best cross the finish line.  And Monday was the epitiome of all of that in that a new world record was set.  Superb !!!

It is because of this level of winning and professionalism why I'm so demanding of our salespeople in our various companies.  Success in Sales is fundamentally the same as winning the Marathon.  Both require personal sacrifice, years of dedication, consistent daily training and the willingness-actually the desire-to adapt to learn  individual skills and adapt to new technologies.  

And, just like professional marathoners, there's no reason why every serious salesperson should not be out there right now lacing up their sneakers to start the day.  One thing that we all can do as we work through this quarter's quota is to map out a personal training regimen between now and the end of August.  

Go out and sell something, today!  

Jack,
Head Coach
Derby Management
jack@derbymanagement.com

 

 

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