If you’ve been feeling as if life and business are surreal lately, you aren’t alone. The renowned and respected sales coach Jack Daly, the special guest for our May 14 webinar, opened his presentation talking about living in unusual times.
“In reality, this is going to stretch on, and some businesses aren’t going to make it. People are going to face real hardship. We, as business owners and salespeople, need to be aware of that stress and anxiety, and it will change many, many things we do,” said Jack, who spent much of the next hour talking about the tenets of great sales organizations that remain true even in the unrest of today’s business landscape.
Jack’s Five Actions to Take
Health & Fitness: Take care of yourself and your health—and guide your sales team to do the same. Why? The better you care for yourself, the longer and smarter hours you can log, plus we all handle stress better when we are healthy and active.
Focus on the Controllable: There are many aspects of the COVID pandemic that are utterly out of our control. Jack’s advice is to focus your energy on those items you can control, investing your time into high-payoff sales activities that will help generate revenue rather than worrying about aspects of business you can’t change right now.
Make a Daily Plan: We’ve all heard the advice from great leaders who say “write it down or it isn’t real.” Jack takes it one step farther: write down your goals and how you intend to meet them. Start with the big picture and then hone that plan down to daily goals. If you have set a big sales goal for Q1, determine what actions will get you there—outbound calls, social posts, etc.—and break that down to daily goals. Then? Find someone to hold your feet to the fire and help you be accountable.
Selling as a Resource: Regardless of the business climate, you should always sell as a resource. What do you have that will help your prospects or clients with their particular pain points? That doesn’t change now. The key to this approach? Be a good listener. Then, find a way to help them with their pain—even if it isn’t your solution. When it’s right for them to do business with you, they will come back.
Empathetic: This step goes hand-in-hand with #4. To get anyone to open up, you must be a good listener. But it takes more—you need to share your struggles, convey what and how this situation is impacting you, and then ask them to tell you how they are doing. Empathy paired with listening will lower barriers and create the foundation for the type of relationship you want with prospects and clients.
Focus on Sales Processes and Systems No Matter the Business Crisis
Jack also shared that many of the pillars of outstanding, world-class sales teams remain the same in both good and bad market climates. For example, systems and processes are always key to efficient and effective sales organizations—pandemic or no. Need some tips for creating those best sales practice systems and processes? Here you go:
Model the masters: Find the people who have already figured it out. Jack says when he meets someone who has been in the President’s Club at any company, he picks their brain. Find out what they are doing to keep landing on that awards stage—in their day-to-day, in their company, in their industry.
Ask questions and listen: Often salespeople get into sales because they like people and they like to talk. That’s where the “show up and throw up” phrase comes from – don’t do that, says Jack. Invest time to consider the best questions you can ask that will illicit the pain point you are looking for, then link your service to their pain. Start asking yourself what will motivate this person to do business with you, and build on that.
Obviously, trying to capture all the value Jack shared is nearly impossible in a blog, so if you want to hear more, check out the webinar recording here.
