Mindset Experiments Archives - 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 14, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

3 Productivity Lessons from the Movement Marketing Summit (So Far)

As I write this post, this is day 8 of the Movement Marketing Summit (4/14/2015 – but the lessons will be evergreen).

The Summit is a two week online conference put on by Aj Amyx and Andy Zitzmann.

I’ve been power listening to the videos during my morning and afternoon commutes (I wish online video players would make it possible to listen at 1.5X or 2.0X speed) and have noticed a few lessons popping up again and again.

These productivity lessons will transform your marketing efforts if you consistently implement them.

1. The 15 Minute Rule

Nearly every single presenter (from Aaron Walker to Sue B. Zimmerman) referenced spending around 15 minutes a day on something. From time spent meditating, to writing in a journal for a morning routine, to time spent engaging on social media or creating an image to post on Instagram.

The 15 Minute Rule kept surfacing. The rule is significant for two reasons:

The 15 Minute Rule Overwhelms Overwhelm: One of our biggest struggles in implementing new strategies or personal or sales disciplines is that we get overwhelmed by all the time we’ll have to spend. Just take 15 minutes. Pick one thing. Do it. Then start doing something else (and if you happen to get traction, then keep on going).
The 15 Minute Rule Leverages the Compound Effect: 15 minutes a day, everyday, will turn the titanic and start sending you in the right direction. 15 minutes of strength exercise. 15 minutes of sending value out via Twitter. 15 minutes of focused time with your children or your spouse. That 15 minutes will transform your life.

2. The 80/20 Rule

While I do not believe that the 80/20 rule is a universal law like gravity or the fact that there’s one tabletop or countertop that is required to be cluttered with junk mail, I do believe that it is a good starter guideline. (Check Web.Search.Social’s Carol Lynn and Ralph Rivera’s writing and podcasting on the 80/20 rule for there passionate, yet well thought-out, rebuttals to our lemming-like belief in the 80/20 principle).

If you are starting out in sales and marketing, the temptation is to try to get people to buy your stuff. Consequently, we spend 80% of the time asking everybody to buy, click, or signup and only 20% of the time adding value.

The 80/20 Rule in marketing is that you share and give value 80% of the time while spending only 20% of the time trying to capture value.

By keeping the 80/20 Rule in mind, you can shift your mindset toward bringing massive value 80% of the time, so that during the 20% of time that you do make offers, you’ll have more leverage with your audience.

You can apply this rule any way you want, but the long and short is that you need to go heavy on value. 20% is NOT a small percentage, so this still gives plenty of permission to serve people by showing them how to buy your stuff. More importantly, this 20% time you spent pitching or selling? That’s not slimy, smarmy, gross, or dumb. It’s giving people an opportunity to buy a solution to their problems.

Therefore, it’s 100% value, just broken down a bit to help keep you from machine-gun pitching.

3. The Checklist Rule

One key discipline that most presenters seemed to have but didn’t make too much fanfare about is the use of a checklist or process.

The power of checklists is in three key areas:

Your Self-Discipline: Self-discipline is a muscle. The more you have to use it during the day, the weaker it gets as the day goes on. When we have to use our short-term memories and that annoying nudge in the back of our minds to remember to keep disciplines around marketing, sales, or other processes, we use up that self-discipline unnecessarily. Using a checklist removes the need to access that limited resource.
Your Trustworthiness: People do business with those they know, like, and trust. Trust isn’t only about trusting your character. It’s trusting that you’ll deliver content and value in a consistent way. Checklists helps keep your product (you, your content, your marketing) delivered in an expected, consistent format. That will build trust.
Your Stress-Level: Checklists give your brain permission to relax. If you had to remember every process, every time, your stress level would go up. And that’s miserable. Another piece of awesome is that if you have checklists, you can further decrease your stress by outsourcing processes to virtual assistants (and those real-life assistants that work in your office).

A Bonus Observation

True confession: I’d never heard of Aj Amyx or Andy Zitzmann until I got an email from Jeff Goins about this Summit.

Apparently, these guys have quite the following. I thought I’d heard of all online marketers and coaches. I was wrong. By the way, Amyz and Zitzmann have put on a stellar online Summit. They ask insightful questions and offer up some golden nuggets of knowledge, themselves.

The Lessons Here

Learn from New People: Don’t limit yourself to the people you’ve heard of. Every once in a while, take in a new webinar or follow a new rabbit trail. Not only had I not heard of Amyx and Zitzmann (I fear that sounds bad, but it’s not. I’m an insurance agent. I can’t know it all), I hadn’t heard of the lion’s share of their guests. Through these fresh voices, I found some new perspectives.
Your Market Has Room for You: I don’t suspect that most of you will want to become online marketers or coaches. The space seems filled to the rim with talent. But the fact that I just now discovered about 30 new voices who are making online hay tells me that even this glutted market has space. Therefore, your market – whatever it is – has plenty of room for you, as long as you bring grit, determination, and your authentic self to the table.

To Wrap It Up…

Pick a discipline, create a process for it, and do it daily – for 15 minutes a day. Make sure that, even if you’re not specifically putting out 80% ‘generous value’ vs. 20% selling and pitching, that you tint everything you do with the generosity that the 80/20 rule represents.