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December 30, 2014 by Brett Leave a Comment

Fooling Ourselves: When We Know Opportunities Aren’t

Pardon my long absence and failing to keep my daily writing commitment. No excuses. I’d claim it’s because I read Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism and had to make decisions on what’s important (partially true).

But in the end, I can keep up a daily blog for 6 months. I don’t have to write Pulitzer-prize worthy nonfiction…. So, onto today’s observation.

When We Know Opportunities are not Opportunities, We Must Cut and Run. 

I listened to the Advanced Selling Podcast on my quicker-than-usual holiday commute. Specifically:

  • The Dreaded Sales Forecast: The GOMA Method (Part 1) – October 6, 2014
  • Another Dreaded Sales Forecast: The GOMA Method (Part 2) – October 13, 2014

GOMA = Get off my tush (I think)

The point of the two podcast episodes: How pipeline meetings are often useless rituals. Like religious rituals, they are often just yawned through or used to shame lagging sales efforts. They aren’t used for coaching and developing and identifying opportunities for improvement.

One of the hosts’ six suggestions is to discontinue our tendency to assign percentage probabilities to pipeline opportunities. We need to learn to evaluate whether each opportunity in our pipeline either will or will not work out in the end.

Most of us know when opportunities are true opportunities and when they are excuses to look busy.

We’re not really fooling ourselves. We are being lazy or betraying a lack of training. It’s important for us to be violently protective of our pipelines. If we know an opportunity will never materialize (or if it’s not a client that fits your profile), we need to learn to clean it and kill it.

Evaluating Opportunities

This pipeline cleansing is a skill I must learn. But here are some best guesses at best practices.

An opportunity is an opportunity when….

  1. The client fits your client profile: Don’t keep hangers on if they don’t fit the type of organization you want to work with.
  2. You have identified all stakeholders: If you’re hanging on with the person who checks with the folks who check with the folks, then you might not have a true opportunity.
  3. You have identified problems that need to be solved.
  4. You’re confident your solutions solve those problems.
  5. You have been able to gain small commitments and collaboration.

How do you keep your pipeline clean? Are you honest about opportunities – if they truly are opportunities?

Filed Under: Sales Experiments Tagged With: advanced selling podcast, pipeline, pipeline management, sales experiments

September 17, 2014 by Brett Leave a Comment

The Importance of Taking Action (as demonstrated by the Small Business Girl)

Today’s Listening and Reading

I finished The Dip by Seth Godin.

What an 11 Year Old Can Teach Us – Advanced Selling Podcast. As a result of listening to this podcast, I went and found…

533: It’s Not the Product, It’s the Person – This American Life Podcast, featurning the ‘Super Business Girl’, Asia Newson. This little ball of energy is known as Detroit’s Youngest Entrepreneur.

Episode 107 The 3 Drivers Of Sales Success Part I September 16, 2014 – Your Sales Playbook, Paul Castain. In this podcast, Mr. Castain talked all about driver 1: Acquiring new business.

Find Your Sales Voice by Taking Action

Castain needs to have Asia Newson open up for him at his keynotes. She knows how to acquire new business. More importantly, she takes action. Hers is a pretty powerful example of using what she has: energy, youth, a vision for her life, and using her products as an excuse for people to pay her for being the ambitious, yet winsome girl that she is.

Not sure if that made sense, but in simple terms, she just goes for it and does not let fear dominate her or cause her to procrastinate.  Granted, she has a silver bullet – her cuteness and her appeal as a young go-getter. Most of us old crusty salesguys don’t have ‘cute’ going for us.

But we have something going for us. We just need to find it and get out in front of people. Perhaps it’s even in the taking action and getting in front of people that we eventually figure out what we have to bring to the table. How do we know if we’re fearfully not taking action?

As we interact and get out there and knock it around, we start finding our sales voice. Just like a writer finds her voice and starts attracting the right readers, so does a salesperson develop a voice by taking action. He then starts attracting the right clients.

But it all starts with taking action (at least one action a day), which brings me to today’s action item…

Today’s Action Item: Castain’s 2 – 2 – 2

This is an exercise where you make sure to send two coldish emails, make two cold calls, and drop two cold letters in the mail.

That was my action item. Sadly, I did not take the action. I did schedule an appointment with someone from a cold email from earlier this week (because of this challenge), but I did not do it today.

My excuse is that I’m going out of town on Friday and Monday and am trying to make sure all ducks are in a row. My second excuse is that given my current role as a liaison between the insurance agents in my agency and the insurance companies, I’m less tied to a prospecting list, so I’d have to dust off some old databases.

But excuses are dumb and a waste. I need to learn to see through them. There’s absolutely no reason to take 30 minutes, identify 6 individuals to reach out to, and then reach out. I have value to create. I should be getting that in front of folks.

Sorry my 5s of readers! We shall hit it again tomorrow. 2-2-2. I’m on it.

Until tomorrow…

Filed Under: Sales Experiments, The Dan Miller Challenge Tagged With: advanced selling podcast, asia newson, cold call, cold email, paul castain, snail mail, super business girl

Hello!

Brett the sales experimenter and the challenge accepter Brett - Sales and Marketing Experimenter. I'm a reluctant sales professional. I didn't start out my career in sales and marketing, but I've grown to enjoy it. Here I discuss marketing, sales, productivity, and mindset experiments that will hopefully yield greater results and a more deeply satisfying sales career.

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  • Is Sales Your Calling?
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Recent Posts

  • Is Sales Your Calling?
  • I Must Be Ruthless about My Time
  • 4 Ideas for Leaders with No Leadership Position
  • 10 Reasons Why Corporate Culture Determines Sales Success
  • 3 Productivity Lessons from the Movement Marketing Summit (So Far)

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