Gotta hand it to the Celtics for their hard work, their athleticism, their perseverance and just true grit, but with Friday night's final score, we're on the sidelines watching the rest of the playoffs.  Playing the game to win is the very nature of every sport, and it's also the core essence of every activity that we engage in as professional salespeople. 

You want to win, you gotta' play to win which means that if you're behind right now halfway through the quarter, you may want to think about changing up your baseline drills for success. 

Here's a few simple, but directly impactful ideas to try out this beautiful Monday morning: 

• Every month: Update your written team playbook by getting everyone on the team directly involved.
  A playbook is not your annual sales plan that you architected last December. This is a living, breathing document that's frequently revisited and updated with the team at the beginning of every month. We've been insisting on these now for a few years, and the direct impact has been amazing.  
  
• Every week:
  -Hold one-hour early AM training drills on one or two specific tactics.
  -Personally connect for 15 minutes with 1 successful person who inspires you.
  -Read 1 technical article written in 2024-2025 on what it takes to be successful in Sales.
  
  
• Every day:
  -Think like a customer first, not a salesperson selling anything.
  -Focus on what you can do to drive direct business value for your customers.
  -Begin each day by verbalizing out loud why you're the best salesperson.
  -Start with activities that energize you-maybe it's exercise or listening to a podcast on the drive.
  -Dig into tracking the math in detail: every play, every conversion and every score. 

our scoreboard halfWAY into Q2 

In my experience, Q2 always sets the pace for the entire year, and there's still plenty of time left in this quarter to make changes that will impact not only in finishing this quarter, also get you through the summer. Changes to your playbook that you make now will have an immediate impact in the summer and a huge impact in putting points on the board from September through December.

Slow Down to Speed Up

One of the most impactful places to begin is to take an objective look at how you're conducting "Discovery", which is always the most important step of all of your steps in your sales process funnel.  Our decades-long data tracking shows that salespeople in general:

• Do not slow down to ask questions and to listen to what challenges a prospect has.
• Want to move directly to a demo so they can talk about features.
• Do not repeat back to the prospect what they heard and ask for confirmation. 

When you think about it, without a true Discovery step, which is really no more than slowing down and carefully listening rather than repetitively shouting, salespeople really do not have permission to begin any sales process. This is exactly why when we interview salespeople about their initial call, 76% of them rate the call as "very positive".  When we ask those same potential buyers how that initial call went, only 36% of them would take another call, most of whom complain that the salesperson didn't take the time to learn about them as a person, their job or their business before the call.  

Let's start off this week halfway through Q2, by slowing down, asking meaningful questions about today's challenges, 2025 business objectives, timelines and budget, listening more thoughtfully while confirming what you heard.  Only then do you have permission to actually play the game of professional sales! 

Enough tactical ideas for this Monday morning to get me and hopefully you jump started! 

It's time to update your own Sales playbook 

Think about taking a day out of one of the first days of June to work with us to tune up...or maybe actually create your first sales playbook.  

Here's our free how-to ebooks for a few ideas:

"Writing the Winning Sales Plan"
"Writing the Winning Business Plan"
"Writing the Winning Marketing Plan"

We outline ideas on structure, models, process funnels, productivity tools and how to recruit, hire and onboard the best people.  We're real salesguys who continue to play and coach the game every day.  

Connect with me any time at jack@derbymanagement.com and let's discuss.