photo credits: Seppo Iivonen

How easy would it be, if you knew for sure that what you do today (to improve your skills), would bring you improvement for tomorrow? If your maximum for push-ups is 50 today, then next week for sure, you could do 55. If you called one more customer today, you would sell 5% more next month. If you learned a new thing today, you could use it in real-life situation tomorrow.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. For some time, you can keep up the development, but then after a while, you will stop developing by doing the same thing allover again. Don't get me wrong here. You need routines in order to develop, but in the end, you need different and updated routines for keep continuing your development path.

In the beginning, work as hard as you can

When I was actively teaching beginner's courses in martial arts, we spend about half of the training time in developing condition and stretching. We had many different movements we were improving, but as an example, we started off with 10 push-ups. Each week we increased the amount by 5 and in the end of the beginner's course, everybody did 50 push-ups. I know what many of you are thinking now. How can someone go from 10 to 50 push-ups in few months. To add more steam to your thoughts (Finnish expression coming from steam in the sauna), after a year of training, everybody did 100 push-ups. The point in this is the amount, not the quality. Many other instructors and teachers in other martial arts, started to demand push-ups with perfect technique. There the development is much slower, whereas with this method, everyone hits higher numbers each week. The point is to set the mind for higher goals and build a stamina for development, not for perfect push-ups.

The same example goes for sales as well. When I get a new team member, fresh out of school, I will put him to contact prospects and existing clients. In my previous post on "Goals and Dreams", I emphasized on building knowledge from the beginning and this method of active contacting might sound like a contradicting method, but it is not. It is very hard to learn business and sales related skills, without talking to customers. You need to hear what kind of language customers are using and how they are approaching different situations. From these conversations, you will start learning your field of expertise and the more customers you talk to, the more information you gather to your knowledge. Therefore, the first step is to learn to work hard in contacting your customer base, whether it be existing customers or prospecting to new business sales.

Start with 10 phone calls per day and next week do 12 and the following 14 and so on. The first conversations don't need to be in-depth ones, but just that you reach a customer and get to the next stage. These could be anything ranging from getting the contact information of the right decision maker, setting up a meeting or getting information for your RFP. Then you move on the the next call. The most important part is to get a routine of picking up the phone quickly and getting back to talking with the prospects.

In my first sales job, I wasn't told about this strategy and was trying to sell immediately to the clients. I got disappointed in not succeeding and wanted to prepare myself better before the call. I spend a lot of time preparing the possible questions and answers, but in the end they were wrong ones. I wasted a lot of time got even more insecure about myself. Later in my career, I got to work with experienced sales people, who drank their coffee at their desk, in order to be able to call the next customer as soon as possible. I started to measure how much of my working time was I on the phone and started writing offers, when it was hard to reach people on the phone. My only goal was to get step further in the sales process and with that in mind, I was able to call up to 50 customers per day. Today, I can easily do the same, whenever needed.

Then comes quality

I can ensure you, that after a year of trying to do more push-ups weekly, you will start building resistance to your development. You will start telling yourself and your instructor, that you cannot hit bigger numbers each week. Your condition is not developing as it was months ago and your body is getting tired and maybe more stiff. You don't recover from 100 push-ups the same way as you did from 10 in the beginning, even if both were your maximum at the time.

This is the perfect time for start learning techniques and building quality in your movements. Now you have the stamina to train harder and some knowledge of your body control. With better body control, it is easier to pick up instructions and control your movements better. With hard physical training, you have built better muscle control and this helps your development in techniques as well. This is the basis in movies like "Karate Kid" or my favorite movie "Drunken Master". At first, the master puts the student through tough physical exercise, which builds stamina for harder training and at the same time has taught the techniques in some mysterious way.

I remember explaining to one of my first sales managers, that I don't want to call prospects that don't buy. It was hard to make dozens of calls each day, when the majority of the prospects didn't want to do business with me. I was trying to explain, that if I had more time to concentrate on each prospect, I would be able to have better conversations and do more sales. If only, I could do less calls each day, I would do them with better quality. This all sounded very good in my head and I'm sure that many of you has had the same conversation with your sales manager.

The problem was that, the less you call, the less you will have conversations with potential buyers. The quality comes from repetition and control, not by avoiding hard conversations. Did I want to develop myself or avoid feeling down after unsuccesful sales calls? Preparation is important, but it needs to be done right. Especially in sales, it is not about the hours you put in, but the results you bring in.

Quantity and quality together

After reaching your limits in developing your skills with approaching quality, it is time to focus on repetitions again. This gets your mind out of quality for a while and soon you will notice that the quality improves even without concentration. You will be able to perform techniques better, even if you don't put emphasis on them anymore. There are times, when you will have to come back to focusing on high quality, but you can never forget to build up your condition as well.

My master, used to demand black belts to take part in the first degree black belt test each year. There you had to go through the hard physical test (including 150 push-ups, 3000 squats, 3 kms running under 11 minutes and many more) and the technique test with the new black belt candidates. This was mentally really hard to go through each year. Many of us, decided not to take part in those events and soon these people quit training or at least reduced the amount of training a lot. But those who went through the test each year, developed very well. The condition was each year better and the skill level was much higher each year.

Many times in sales, these teachings are forgotten. It is hard to go back to telesales, especially when your title might be Sales Director or similar. It is nice and easy to talk with the same customers as you have talked for many years. But don't forget to talk to new prospects as well. Don't forget the basics and go back to the basics often enough. If you are great in sales, it doesn't matter which part of the sales process you pick up, you will do well. If this is not the case, then you are not great in sales yet. With changing your focus back and forth from repetition to quality, you will become one.