Prospecting By The Inch is a Cinch
I don’t know if there is an original author of the quote: “Success by the yard is hard but success by the inch is a cinch,” but I first heard it when I worked in Vermont as an insurance agent. It was a way for my manager to make the point about the importance of daily (inch) prospecting instead of doing all of your prospecting in the last couple of days of the month (yard).
I do know who said and recorded this great YouTube video: “You Control How You Play.” That individual is Ryan Holiday. Do yourself a favor and watch the 2:55 min video.
Holiday makes it very clear that in the midst of all the things that can go wrong as you pursue not just an athletic endeavor, but any endeavor really, all kinds of challenges can come at you that you cannot possibly control. So in order to improve the possibility of achieving your desired outcome, the stoic is suggesting that you focus on just one thing:
How You Play!
In order to do that, I’m convinced that the most highly successful sales people come pre-wired with what Dave Kurlan, founder of the Best Sales Assessment Tool in the World, calls Will to Sell.
Will to Sell Consist of the following:
- Desire for success in selling
- Commitment to do everything possible, assuming legal, ethical and moral standards, to succeed
- Motivation to achieve and overcome obstacles
- Take responsibility for outcomes
- Outlook that is straight forward without reacting to up or down markets, or conditions
If you are a leader of a sales organization and you come to realize that most of your sales team is not performing at the level you thought they would when you hired them, then you need to do more than just tell them to work harder, see more people, run faster, stop making excuses. You need to do more than put them on a PIP and you need to do more than replace them with new non-performing salespeople.
Find out if they have the will to sell and then coach them, train them and hold them accountable. You then have a team of stoics that are willing to take ownership of outcomes by controlling how they play.
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