“Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle - when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.”

I have an RSS feed from the website JustSell.com, and it starts the day with a quote, and this one appeared yesterday as I was getting on the 5:30 Amtrak to New York.   I was intrigued for a number of reasons.  First, I was certainly doing the “wake up early” thing having left the NH beach at 3:30 AM. 

Second, decades ago, just out of college, I joined the Peace Corps and taught English for the next couple of years in the then small town of Moshi (Swahili for “smoke” from the volcano on the mountain) in northern Tanzania at Kilimanjaro, and my daily routine was filled with various wildlife whether we were on safari or not since we bordered a game reserve.

Third, I first came across this same quote a few years ago from Steve Theroux, the CEO of Lake Sunapee Bank, who has made it the theme of his very successful team of sales, business development and branch managers, who no matter what are out there every day running hard in their local communities.  Lake Sunapee Bank is a superb community bank, highly focused in the targeting of its NH and Vermont customers and has adopted a comfortable, folksy but formal sales process of…Selling the LSB Way. A well oiled machine, the bank continues to make its numbers, which, in these economic times, is no small task.  Bank of America could learn a lot from LSB.

And lastly, with around 36 selling days left in this year, running hard and getting up early is an absolute if we are going to max out what’s left of this year.

Not that it's going to help you this year, but you might want to think about attending our Sales Management Effectiveness Boot Camp April 1st-April 3rd in Boston.After a solid quarter under your belt, we know from our experience of five years of Boot Camps that a retuning, a look at new ideas and the opportunity to talk to other management professionals is just the thing to kick up productivity for the rest of the year.  Read through the stuff on our website, and just schedule a 10 minute call to walk through the details and answer questions.

In the meantime, you might want to click on to our Sales Toolbox for a few ideas about creating sales plans for next year.  

Good Selling  !
(…or in my best, Swahili: Nzuri ya kuuzia !)

Jack
Head Coach

Just 16 more days to Opening Day at Stratton.
Just 16 more days to try out my new Rome boards
Just 16 more days...