In our blog post three weeks ago, I proclaimed that the biggest factor between good and great salespeople is that great salespeople are proactive and do the things that make them great. The good ones don’t. They respond. They work hard. They’re nice people. They’re good salespeople … but they’re not great, and they won’t even be good when the market is no longer booming.
With this proclamation, I committed to releasing five ideas for salespeople to be more proactive in their week-to-week activity. The first four were 1. Start small, 2. Block off proactive time on your calendar, 3. Do it early, and 4. Turn off all notifications. And this week we have our fifth and final idea to help salespeople become more proactive.
Idea #5: Plan for potential obstacles.
When I was elected president of my fraternity at the University of Florida, I was immediately engrossed into a ton of leadership training (some of the best training I’ve ever received, by the way). One of the first topics was risk management. At that point, I thought risk management was the guy that gave out the wrist bands at parties to guests who were over 21 years old. I had no idea about the power of managing risk. Not only did this practice help us avoid mistakes, but it also gave me a calm feeling because I knew that whatever incident might occur, we had a plan. Calmness combined with ambition and a hard work ethic can be a dangerous recipe to massive success – especially as a sales professional.
So, how can you plan for potential obstacles?
- Identify potential obstacles. Some examples: phone calls, emails, temptations to check your social media accounts, coworkers popping in, and the most powerful of all … one’s inability to focus on one and only one task!
- Develop ideas to minimize or eliminate those potential obstacles. Using the examples above, some ideas are turning off your phone and email (you can keep email on, but go offline), remove the social media apps from your phone so you’re forced to type in the URL, close your office door, tell your coworkers when you’re in deep thinking mode, work outside the office, and to combat the never-ending racing mind … learn to focus by using one of several practices. Meditation, focused attention, deep breathing, etc. are among dozens of exercises that will help you master your wandering mind.
- Do it.
- Accept imperfection. Don’t beat up yourself if you roamed off to Instagram for five minutes or engaged in a conversation with a neighbor while working at Starbucks. Just bring yourself back to the task and start again. It’s that simple. No one keeps from being distracted. The great ones simply return to the task. Do this a trillion times in your life and you’ll get better every time.
Click here for a worksheet to organize your Obstacle Management Process.
I hope you enjoyed these five ideas in this series and more importantly, I hope that you’re putting them into practice!
