We work extremely hard to schedule sales calls. Whether a presentation, discovery call, demo, or lunch & learn, we bang out dozens of touches to win that appointment. When we finally get the “yes”, and lock in a time on the calendar, we celebrate. But the game just started.
We tend to think the score board only covers objective items like scheduled appointments, proposal deliveries, and closed sales. We fist-pump when we schedule an appointment, high-five our boss when we are asked for a proposal, and take the team out for happy hour when we close the sale. However, we tend to be pretty flat on the things in between - the sales calls - and they’re the things that really matter.
For some reason, we shift into auto-pilot during our sales calls. We believe that the PowerPoint we’ve shown about two thousand times since 2008 actually makes an impact. We assume people care about our mission statements, the age of our business, and the number of employees we have. We don’t prepare. Maybe we don’t wing it, but we don’t really prepare. This is our stage – our opportunity to shine - and we just sort of do ok. What can we do differently?
I’ve developed eight ideas that help sales people incredibly elevate their performance on sales calls.
