Conversely, if “things”-let’s now substitute the specific of “sales” for the generality of “things”-are not consistent, and they don’t follow a process, then, there’s going to be very little predictability; therefore, no dopamine, and salespeople very quickly move to the state of “not feeling good”. Sales predictability regarding opportunities and prospects cascades from high to low while their forecastability factor plummets from 80 percentiles to zippo at worst or “just confused” at best. Once that happens, average salespeople become distracted, they run from activity to activity and become totally disconnected from any consistent pattern finally launching themselves off the end-of-the-quarter cliff at 100 miles an hour. Lots of activity, little productivity, lousy quarter.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Not so hard in concept. Wicked hard to execute on...just takes consistency of practice, so here's an idea. What if in your sales meeting this Monday morning, you were to agree on nailing down just one difficult sales skill related to your current sales process over the period of the balance of this month? One skill, three weeks of hard practice and consistent drills. Seems that it would work, what do you think?
In the meantime, have a great week selling as we all push toward the end of this quarter!
As most of you know, I'm a marketing professor at Tufts in my spare (?) time, where I have the pleasure of working with juniors and seniors in a unique program. Each semester, I embed five students/team into six companies to execute on complex, semester-long, marketing assignments, and I am now looking for companies for the fall semester. Companies have ranged in size from emerging startups to large corporations such as an international military contractor, a leading bank along with a wide variety of middle market businesses ranging in revenue from $5 to $100 million. The common factor is that they all have interesting and complex marketing projects. If you're interested, just email me, and I will set up a call to discuss this with you. It's a great opportunity to solve the marketing project idea that you've been thinking about, but haven't had the extra resources to put to it.