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Prospecting Like a Machine

When your peers watch you, they see you prospect like a machine.  Nothing stops you from the hunt.  As a result, prospecting consistency smoothes out the hills and the valleys of sales production.  Your sales revenue rises and falls at an average equal to or above your goals.

When people look over your shoulder, they see a disciplined prospector - someone with a laser focus who puts first things first.  You schedule at least an hour each day alongside other important appointments to call your leads.  You keep your prospecting time sacrosanct.

For the hours that you set aside, you track results - contacts and first appointments set.

You work to increase your prospecting efficiency - contacts and appointments per hour, and your prospecting effectiveness - first appointments with target market leads (your ideal profile).

Those who watch, who are without your discipline, marvel at the amount of prospects you find and move into sales-in-progress (quotes).  And, they marvel at how your sales production, while rising from one month to the next, manages to stay near your goal achievement plan. 

They see a professional.  YOU.  Best regards, Lance.

Commitment

This is where it begins.  With goals and standards.  With clear job descriptions.  With a push the boat off from shore - do not look back decision - about what we are about.

New hires can smell the certainty of direction - the clear, unconfusing signals - the here’s what we’re about purpose of the team.

Team members know where the coach stands and what is important.  Processes are simple and followed - but, not above being changed.  Processes are built to help people achieve commitments - and to help people, not just for the sake of processes. 

And, most importantly, even without great people skills, each person knows that the coach is committed to their personal success and the team’s success. 

This is never in doubt. 

Now, go and make things better.  You can.  Know who you are and what you stand for.  Lance

Hope

Great coaches believe the individual will win and the team will win.  What they do and say, when behind or ahead of goal, whether near defeat or after a loss, builds confidence in future achievement.

This is not to say that they coach in a King Arthur Camelot world of unreality.  No, great coaches are realists.  And, they have healthy doses of skepticism.  But, if they commit to you as a team member, they will always do and say things to help you get better - even in the face of great difficulty and slow progress.

With this hopeful spirit carried away from the office, salespeople walk through just one more door

They pick the phone up more times per hour.  Their voice inflections cast belief into a prospect’s wavering decision.  They win more often.  They keep believing that ... they have what it takes.  Now, go and make things better. You can.  Lance.

Passion

How do great coaches go about their work?

With passion - with energy.  You can look at them and see the working spirit of committed hope.  You can see the early morning rise and the late evening commitment when the load is great on everyone. 

When they speak, it may not be with a great oration, or with a gift of fine words.  But, it is with strength, commitment, and hope.  They know what they believe in and they go about work with the passion of a patriot.

Their purpose is clear - do their very best right now with what they have and for what they believe in. The strive to get better each day.  And, they direct this passion to help the team and each individual achieve their potential. 

Powerpoints that KILL or SELL

or Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson (see: beyond bullet points) ...

I remember the overhead projector and transparencies of the 70’s.  And, I remember presenters who loved their transparencies - talking to them - expressing their content.  These presenters never saw the folks who slept though their work in darkened rooms.  They just continued to drone through the slides one at a time.  I did see one presenter go into just a single slide and we never saw him return.

BORING ...

Today, people are sick of powerpoints, keynotes, and all types of electronic presentations that contain a mumbo jumbo of words, graphs, flying saucers, and mounds of detail.  They want short quick points put together in a sequence of images and words that emotionally and factually tell a story - a story about THEM.  Even books are being written this way.

(It reminds me of a sign I once saw on an engineer’s office door, “Eschew Obfuscation!” Please look these words up and have a laugh ... speaking of laughs about this entire subject, please see the following video: Life After Death by PowerPoint
)

So, lets move beyond bullet points as Cliff has been advocating since 2004 in blogs and books. 

Lets develop storyboards that capture an audience - their situation, their needs, and the impact of problems and solutions. 

Imagine entering a room and sitting down for a presentation.  And, from the very first slide you find yourself drawn into a world about you and the things important to you.  You absorb the facts and experience the transformation that a product or service will have upon your world.  Clarity and drama occur together and you see what’s important.  You understand the difference.  You find yourself nodding and smiling.  The world changes and you invest yourself in it.  You buy it.  Kinda like lipstick on a pit bull.  WOW.  AWESOME!  Check it out and have fun.  Make things better.  Change the world.  Lance.

Working Strategies to Win Major Accounts

If you look up the word “strategy” in various dictionaries, you find military terms like conducting, devising, or developing campaigns (or wars) to achieve a goal.  Squad leaders gather to decide approaches, methods, and lines of attack designed to win.  They spend much time planning a strategy and reviewing the results after the strategy is tactically deployed in the field.

Think about a football team that prepares for a game.  What do they know before the game begins?  What information do they use to choose what plays to run and to plan out their defensive and offensive schemes? 

During the game, what discussions occur?  How does the quarterback or coach decide what to do next?  Why do they decide to use certain plays at certain times and at certain points in the game and at certain locations on the field?

Winning major accounts require strategic thought.

Those teams and individuals who successfully win new major accounts spend more time in thought and less time in action.

They work a planned process to position what they do before they do it.  They lay out their moves in relation to all the information available.  They seek to be in the right place with right people and with right presentation.  Take your time with the “big ones.” Lance

By the way, here is a good book review of Neil Rackman’s Major Account Sales Strategy by Rob Reed see book review.