I love January, one of the busiest months of the year for me, lots of workshops, people want to meet, the buzz of optimism everywhere. All this makes it a lot easier to deal with some of the nay-sayers you meet. What brought this on was the number of sales people who respond to new ideas or new techniques by saying “I could never do that”.
Cool, more for those that do take things on board and incorporate it to their routine in winning deals and making money. You can see it as you look out over the room, the go getters who consistently deliver and make money are processing and inputting; you can see them putting it together in their minds, picturing how they will apply and monetize the concepts and techniques.
Some other faces you see them searching for how they can rationalize not using the concepts and methodologies, and why it will not work for them. It is an interesting look, this look of rationalization; it is very close to the look of fear, the fear of success. I would like to help them overcome, but they push back and reject the whole thing, the concept, the application, the offer to help to implement, I guess the money that they could make.
If someone out there can help me understand, I would welcome it, as it may help some of these otherwise fine reps make some money.
Sell well!
The Pipeline
This post has 1 comments
January 24th, 2008
As someone who has sat through a LOT of sales training over the last 15 years, this post really resonated with me.
At one stage of my career I was one of the rationalizing ones. I had been in the game for a few years, had been successful. The last thing I wanted to do was spend a day out of the field . . . . sitting there so some trainer could tell me how to do my job.
But when you decide that you’re going to be a serious student of the game of sales, you take on a different attitude to sales training . . . or at least, I did.
I decided to approach sales training the same way a world class athlete approaches watching game video.
A professional baseball player, for example, spends hours every month looking at video of his own performance and his competitors’ performance. Why?
He’s not going to get something revolutionary from every second of that time. What he’s looking for is that one tiny, incremental improvement that gives him an edge, maybe only in one specific situation.
My goal is to go into every sales training and find one principle, tool, or technique that makes my game stronger. And going in with that goal I’ve not been disappointed.
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The Pipeline » “I Never Learned How Not To Do What I Can’t Do”-
September 11th, 2009
[...] do what they don’t do, especially having never done. I have written before about the “I couldn’t do that”, but this is different; in that case those people were reluctant to change or take on new [...]
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