The Sales Experiment -

July 15, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

Is Sales Your Calling?

I know a few guys who love sales as a craft. They love selling. They consider it an art. They don’t necessarily care what they are selling (as long as it works, solves problems, and is ethical). They just love opening relationships and closing deals.

To them, sales is their calling.

But for many of us? Sales is a tool. Being in the sales profession is a means to an end.

We sell because it’s the best way we’ve found to support our families.

We sell because we’ve been sold hard on a particular product that we want the world to know about.

We sell because we are so passionate about a particular target market and feel our service can radically help that market.

We sell because selling can be a creative endeavor.

I love the story that Todd Henry tells about former running back Curtis Martin in his book Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day.

Henry recounts that Martin didn’t love football but he loved that being excellent in football allowed him to start a foundation that helps single moms and disadvantaged youth.

To quote Martin’s Hall of Fame induction speech: “I knew the only way I was going to be successful at this game called football is if I played for a purpose that was bigger than the game itself, because I knew that the love for the game just wasn’t in my heart.”

We Don’t Have to Be Passionate about Sales to Be Excellent in Sales

And I repeat: You don’t have to be passionate about sales to be excellent in sales.

[Tweet “You don’t have to be passionate about sales to be excellent in sales.”]

But you and I both have to discover a few things that will spur excellence.

A Why: You have to discover an overall purpose. I won’t go so far as to say you must discover a purpose for your life (not a bad idea). But you do have to discover a compelling driver for you to do excellent work at your day job, even if that day job doesn’t consists of tasks you love to do. (Resource: Simon Sinek’s Start With Why)
An Approach That Works for You: One source of misery for sales pros is the temptation to believe you must have a certain personality type. You must look like a specific high performer. You gotta be a hunter. All the cliches. While there may be some truth that certain personalities can be helpful, I do not believe it’s true that you must have a certain personality type. There are people and organizations that will benefit from what you bring to the table. Spend time clarifying the way you want to approach sales tasks and processes. Be creative.
Good Habits or Self-Discipline: The key ingredient for sales is to learn to take consistent action. Honestly, even wrong consistent action is better than spending too much time trying to decipher what the right action might have been. Sales is an experiment. You go all in with a specific prospecting method and iterate and pivot and improve as you go. You can’t really break sales. But you can procrastinate, get distracted, do paperwork that doesn’t need to be done, etc.

Sales Does Not Have to Be Your Calling

I’ll just admit it. Sales, to me, isn’t my calling. I appreciate what being in the sales profession allows me to do for people in my life and for my clients. I love helping people and organizations achieve their goals. I love playing around in the world of marketing.

Don’t fret. Don’t allow the fact that you might have had different plans when you graduated college to turn you sour on your sales career. Make your own connections between your day job and your calling. You might find that that day job becomes more than a job.

July 6, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

I Must Be Ruthless about My Time

One of productivity’s biggest killers is our tendency to allow other people’s priorities to determine our schedules.

We become ineffective if we do not filter every opportunity or task through the lens of our personal and work priorities.

We must be ruthless about our time. It is the most precious non-human resource we have at our disposal. The way we use our time predicts our relationships, our work outcomes, and our health.

When we allow others’ opinions about what we should be doing at a particular moment, we give up our overall effectiveness.

Will we please a particular person at a particular moment? Maybe.

Will we be rewarding their bad behavior so they will continue to butt in on our days with a sense of entitlement to our immediate jumping when they request we jump? Most definitely.

It’s a Balancing Act

If you’re reading this, then you are probably in sales or marketing and you are responsible to clients, managers, and other stakeholders.

Consequently, you must balance others’ very real needs of your time and effort with your commitment to producing long-lasting results.

The question is how to do this. How do you make sure to enter info into your customer relationship management software while still taking time to prospect into new opportunities while quarterbacking a servicing need for an existing client? Two of which always seem urgent (guess which one always gets put on the back burner).

Keeping all of these priorities (because they are all things that need to get done) is a skill that can be developed through developing some key habits.

Practices to Help You Develop Time Management Ruthlessness

We are all different, so I will not be prescriptive here. As a matter of fact, I continually play with different practices and habits to help me win in this area. I struggle with people pleasing in the worst way and find I must be vigilant about my tendencies to “Yes” myself to death.

What follows are mindset shifts and tactical practices to help.

Mindset Shifts

Be Intentional: Most of us live in our inboxes. And we feel busy. Inbox triage all day long is the opposite of intentionality. Develop an intentional mindset. When you do something, ask yourself if it serves your key responsibility areas, your primary goals, and your ultimate personal priorities.
Be Willing to Say No: You must be willing to say “No” or “Net yet” or “I’m not the best one to do that for you.” We can’t usually disregard a request completely, but we can put it in its proper place on our calendar or delegate it to the best priority.
Be Selfish: Learn to take the first few hours of the day to plow through your main priorities and tasks. Don’t feel bad about waiting until 10am or 11am before bouncing around like a pinball according to others’ priorities. Treat your first couple hours as if you had a client meeting. And your client is yourself.

Tactical Practices

Time-blocking: Duh. But do you do it? This fits hand in glove with being intentional. Determine the best days and times of the week for certain important but not urgent tasks. Block time for making prospecting calls. Block time for creative work. Block time for strategic planning. Treat these times as appointments and meetings. There’s nothing that someone needs from you at 9am, that they can’t wait for until 10am or 11am.
Process Creation: Identify where your work can be broken down into processes. Codify those processes. Inform others. Creating processes does two things: (1) It helps you create a habit around a task so you don’t need to think about it every time, and (2) it gives you an easier way to say “No” or delegate or put a false-urgent into the calendar because you have a “proven process” to handle such requests.
Email Avoidance: Many people balk at this one. Just try it. Turn off your automatic send/receive for at least 30 minutes two times a day (and expand as you can). You can still send emails or review any relevant emails for a project you are working on. Most email clients allow you to send manually without receiving messages.

How Do You Protect Your Time?

Let me know in the comments. The six items above are quite general and basic, so I’d love to hear how you specifically ward off time thieves.

April 20, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

4 Ideas for Leaders with No Leadership Position

Most of us are not in positions of leadership.

We aren’t CEOs or Vice Presidents or Directors of departments. Most of us serve at the behest of someone else (or many someone elses).

Yet many of us have a spark of leadership that can’t be quenched.

If we have any inclination toward leadership, then we won’t be able to keep that spark under wraps for long. But how can we develop our leadership skills when we have no position or authority?

My Experiment with Leading from Within

About three years ago, I was struggling with how to lead and influence at the sales organization where I work. Then the perfect opportunity arose.

Due to a software system overhaul, the whole firm had to relearn processes that had been in place for nearly 15 years. Grumbling and complaining were rampant. It was becoming a hindrance to productivity.

While I had no official position or authority, I decided to issue an invitation to my colleagues.

I sent an email to the whole staff, inviting them to a weekly Monday lunch.

We would not complain or blame (systems, others, etc.)
We would identify one habit or practice that would help us increase our sales.
We’d keep each other accountable for this one thing and check in each Monday.

There are about 3-5 of us that still meet Mondays to swap stories, encourage action, and try new methods and strategies.

Creating this group was one way to stretch myself as a leader, regardless of my position, and even if it only resulted in a small group of sales pros who wanted to hone their craft.

Here are four ways you can start leading now, regardless of your position

There are many ways you can start leading yourself and influencing others. Here are some suggestions.

Become an Idea Machine

This suggestion comes from James Altucher’s practice of building your idea muscle. Ideation and innovation are leadership skills. Many of us just get our jobs done, but we always have ideas for improvement. We just don’t identify and take note of these ideas.

Start a practice of coming up with 10 ideas a day that will benefit your boss, colleagues, direct reports, or clients. Don’t worry about sharing them… yet. The right time will find you.

Develop a CEO Mentality

Don’t get uppity, but consider yourself CEO of your career. Your work makes up the services you provide to your key client which happens to be your employer. Filtering your work through the idea of being your own CEO will help you to take greater ownership of the outcomes and value you create for your boss.

Taking ownership is a leadership skill and trait.

Stop Complaining and Avoid Gossip

This one is more about the cultural influence part of leadership than traditional leadership skills. Simply avoiding gossip and putting a lid on your complaining will set you apart from the rest of the crowd at your office.

Highlight the Good Work, Success, and Ideas of Others

One powerful way to lead will be to ask your colleagues and direct reports about their ideas. Send an email to your boss to compliment the good work of a coworker or to share her idea (making sure to give her the credit, of course).

Uncovering the unique perspectives of others and praising them for good work are two more leadership skills that are easily developed regardless of authority or poistion.

Your Turn

How have you led from the inside of your organization?

What ideas can you add that will help others develop leadership skills from the middle of the cubicle farm?

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