Training for my sales marathon
That’s it – a new kind of discipline is necessary for me to increase our sales. Like a dedicated athlete who is training for a marathon, I am now putting myself into training for the daddy of all sales marathons. Just like an athlete would dedicate the same amount of time to pounding the pavement everyday, so shall I.
The first aspect to my training is going to be dedicating the 10 to 11AM hour to making sales calls EVERYDAY; and making appointments for Tuesdays and Thursdays each week. In addition, my training is to include sending 5 pitch emails every morning before the kids wake up, and writing a baby fabulous blog post at least every other day.
I realize that I can have all the “to-do” lists in the world, but they are useless without time constraints. I find myself saying “I need to call so-n-so” and then days will go by before I get around to it. No more, no more, no more.
Today was my first training session and let me just say that it was hard to make myself sit and focus on sales calls for an hour. Because I’m not organized enough yet. I need to have the list of leads ready to go at the beginning of the calling hour, along with a tracking sheet of what contact has been made, when, and the next action item – for each lead.
I also immediately realized how nice it would be to have a script. I kind-of-sort-of have a script worked out in my head, but I was stumbling over myself today. So I’m going to make myself practice that in the mirror, in addition to some standard responses to some typical questions and ‘nays’.
Sales is not my strong point at this point. I haven’t had formal sales training, but I still close the deal 80% of the time, so I know the goods are in me. Right now, I know little about setting sales goals and forcasting. So, I’m blindy setting a sales goal of a 20% increase in sales each month. I think I read that somewhere. I didn’t make it for November, which is what made me create my new plan of action and my new perspective on being a super-athlete training for the marathon of all marathons. I also didn’t FOCUS on making new sales in November, like I will now.
Next, I’ll find the hour to dedicate each day to designing!
Discipline. Focus. Action.
Discipline.
Focus.
Action.
Add comment December 3rd, 2007