Growth Dynamics Get Down

Do you prefer hotdogs or steak? I bet you said steak.

In this episode of Fast Tip Friday, Charlie talks about the analogy of Steak and Hotdogs to encourage your sales efforts.

As the calendar indicates the New Year is fast approaching, it is prime time for sales management to ask some challenging questions about their team’s performance. Most sales managers find that checking the final numbers for their team satisfies their desire to evaluate what happened over the previous 12 months. But are those results the real story of how your team performed or could they be hiding some important facts that require a deeper look?

Face it; sales is difficult even for the best in the profession. For many sales provides too many opportunities to give up or make excuses for not making quota or just setting an appointment for a sales call. Being significantly successful in business development requires a commitment to being significantly uncomfortable a significant amount of time. You must learn that without risk of failure there is little chance of experiencing the rewards that top producers enjoy, and frankly, for many that cost is too much to pay.

When an injury causes trouble with typing, your vlog. 

For the last few months, I have heard this line in one fashion or another from so many salespeople that I think I want to scream. It is not just this line that is the problem, but the rest of the conversation that revolves around that it makes no sense to make sales calls because prospects are going to ask for the items that are not available. In other words, selling is at a standstill because back orders are everywhere, and salespeople cannot change that reality.

As the calendar hits mid-June and I can hear the kids in the neighborhood celebrate the last day of the school year I ponder what they learned about life as well as their scholastic advancement. Those ideas provoke thoughts about what salespeople learn from one year to the next, or are they just repeating their earliest days in sales over and over, not really growing from the experiences along the way. So often when I am working with a sales team someone will complain about a prospect that will not return a call or a customer that expects to buy everything at the lowest possible price. Inevitably someone says that is just the way sales is and that complaining never makes it different. In other words, just live with it because that stuff just goes with the territory.

Why Hiring Is Still a Challenge When There is Talent Available?

The pandemic is not necessarily a negative impact event, particularly if you are looking for quality sales talent to add to or upgrade your sales team. With many employers downsizing or “smart-sizing” during the Covid impacted economy, there are quality professionals looking for new places to go to work. Bad things happen to good people, and that is particularly true as we head into the new year as some people have been caught in circumstances beyond their control and find themselves suddenly unemployed. Now just might be the right time to start hiring, but it is not the right time to hire poorly and just add bodies to the roster.

Yes, you read that right. Ditch the To Do List in 2021. Seriously, those anchors of personal productivity are more trouble than they are worth. The intentions are all good, and the trusty old To Do List is better than nothing, but honestly, they are not worth the hundreds of tablets you have them written on. Do yourself a favor and stop creating To Do Lists.