Sales Strength: The key to building a muscle is repetition. You often need to do at least 4 sets to concentrate on that particular muscle to attack it. You might keep a particular routine for a certain period of time and then change your entire routine. It’s a paradox: just when the muscle is built through repetition, and your body has found a way to cheat (we don’t go out of our way to cheat, we just find little tricks and shortcuts), you purposely attack the muscle differently. You shock the muscle out of comfortable and stretch it in new ways. The same goes for sales campaigns. Just when you’ve found an approach that works, one that you’re comfortable repeating and you hit a peak it’s time to try a new strategy. This will keep you fresh in your sales approach.
Keep Up Your Cardio: Part of overall fitness is being physically fast and adept. This keeps you reflexive and responsive- great for new or challenging campaigns. It will also help with the only constant in sales: change. Just any good trainer will encourage you to mix up your cardio to keep interest, mix up your sales routine. Give it some variety, make it fun. Without losing focus, give your sales routine variety. Plus, a tactic or approach you discover in a meeting on one campaign you might be able to transfer to a phone call on another. Another tip from a trainer; my personal trainer told me after we’d been working on perfecting my pushups for a while to just do as many as I possibly could simply to stretch myself. Some days I do the same with phone calls or meetings. I just dive in and do as many as possible. I keep doing this because the results are always such a good return on energy, and it always increases my sales fitness. When’s the best time to do this? On the days you least feel like it. (I didn’t say it was easy).
Stretch Between Sets: This is one of the biggest sanity savers. I find people either fall into 2 camps. The constant doer or the person who works best in short, sharp bursts. Neither is better than the other in my mind. Both work. Sometimes the same sales person will go through periods of both ways of working. However, you’ll generally fall into one pattern or the other. Either way, pace yourself, and give yourself downtime between sets. Whether it’s the long marathons of travel or back to back meetings, give yourself time to recover, breathe and stretch wherever you can. You’ll have renewed energy and vigor for the next sale.
Recovery: One of the best lessons personal training has taught me is that we can often bounce back much faster than we think. Much, much faster. In sales we can bounce back from rejections, disappointments, time wasted on fruitless leads and any other of the mistakes made in strategy or execution. The key is in reminding ourselves that we can. I found abs challenging for quite some time until my trainer told me that abs are highly resilient if exercised properly. You might feel like you hit the point of exhaustion. That’s when it’s good to dig deep. You’ll be surprised how much you have in reserve. Perhaps you, like me, will find that the last call of the day, the one you had to force yourself to do, is in fact the most fruitful.
Cool Down and Stretch Some More: This is longer than the rest between sets, this is the relaxation part. If you’ve done a good work out (telesales campaign, trade fair, series of sales meetings), then you owe it to yourself to relax, take stock, reflect on what worked, what didn’t and why. This way you give yourself – and your team if you manage one – the chance to reenergize and refocus. And as with any good strength building program, the muscle will actually be built during the rest and repair time.
To your sales success
Michael Neaylon
michael@mcme.com.au
Author of the fortchoming book, 'True Brand Toolkit: How to Bring in Big Dollars For Your Small Business.'
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