Sales Success is Spelled B-A-T. If you are the sales equivalent to Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig or Joe DiMaggio - consistently hitting home runs - then read no further. The last thing you will want to do is change anything! On the other hand, even if you’re batting .300 but you seldom hit a homer, you may want to continue to read on.
A sales career is not easy! Anyone who says it is easy, has never done it, or they are wimping out and not being the best they could be. It has hundreds, maybe thousands of rules and skill sets that are required to make it a success. However, all of those rules and skills can be classified under three basic categories: Behavior, Attitude and Technique. You must have a balance of all three if you are going to make it long term.
There isn’t enough room in this column to cover all the sub-categories and explain them thoroughly, but I do want you to think seriously on how you perform in the primary ones.
Behavior
This isn’t the one category that is the most important, but it has to come first if I’m going to spell BAT and use it effectively in the headline.
How often do you have great plans for organizing your week so that you cover all the bases and work effectively at accomplishing all your responsibilities, only to find out by Tuesday you’re already behind? By the end of Friday you have two pages of “to do’s” and phone calls that you have to make? Did you make any sales? More importantly did you plant those seeds for sales down the road?
You probably spent your time doing what we lovingly refer to as “hysterical activity”! But it’s no laughing matter. To prevent getting lost in time doing hysterical activity you will need to be operating with the following behavioral activities in place:
- Define your Core Values and write a Personal Mission Statement. Everyone needs to have these in place before you start on you career journey. Basically you have to define what is really important to you (e.g. family, ethics, environment, spiritual position, etc.) and include them in a Mission Statement that indicates your ultimate purpose in life.
- Now that you have your Core Values and Mission Statement in place, you can list the Goals that will help you achieve those values. Goals are markers along your life and career path. They let you know how you are doing on your journey, and give you incremental targets to shoot for as you strive to accomplish your mission. It’s important to have long term (5 – 10 year) and short term (6 months – 1 year) goals that can be supported by weekly and even daily goals. Of course goals don’t mean anything unless you track your performance on accomplishing them. So don’t make goals that are so difficult that you can not reasonably achieve them. On the other hand you don’t want a whole bunch of “no brainer” goals that won’t cause you to grow. Write down your progress as you go and reward yourself accordingly.
- Those goals can then be broken down into daily behaviors. For example: If I need an average of 144 sales each year. I must get 12 per month or an average of 3 per week. To get 3 sales I must talk to 6 qualified prospects. To get 6 qualified prospects I need to talk to at least 3 referrals and 6 new leads each week.
For all that to happen, my weekly goals will have to be to; 1) Ask for at least 3 referrals each week. 2) Find 6 suspects (a suspect is an unqualified prospect), to talk to each week. If I do those behaviors consistently I will achieve my 144 sales per year (assuming the ratios don’t change).
This is the first of a three part series on SUCCESS Training. The subject in next week’s column will deal with what it takes to have and maintain a successful attitude. The “A” in B.A.T.
