Oh, boy, I don't even know why this topic is coming up a lot recently, but I've run into a lot of people that have, for some reason or another, the word fear has shown up in our conversations and coaching sessions. And so I thought I'd take time on this fast Friday tip to sort of dig into this idea of fear and share some thoughts with all of you.
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.
The next episode of Charlie & Company Talk Business, Life and Everything In Between is here. Charlie Hauck, president and owner of Growth Dynamics, and Sarah Waple, general manager, spend some time with Chuck Swope and Nicky Lyddane of SwopeLees Commercial Real Estate.
We've all heard it before- it's the market conditions that are making it hard for me to __________. Fill in that blank with any of your favorite or least favorite sales challenges- setting appointments, prospecting, closing, shipping, getting PO's, sending quotes or finding projects to quote.
I am annoyed, but there is an upside to this annoyance. They are constructing a natural gas pipeline right outside my office, and I mean right outside my office, like 20 yards from my window. The noise is constant, and despite all the sound barriers they’ve constructed the noise is still annoying. And to make things worse, they don’t know when it will end. So, yes, I am annoyed.
Yesterday I sat in our monthly session of our High-Performance Sales Program with a room full of sales professionals and they were all talking about how rude many people have, in their eyes, become. One attendee even spoke about how an affiliate of their office questioned how she even acquired the contact’s phone number.
As I look back over 2018, I find myself thinking of the people I’ve met and done business with this year. All in all, the experience shakes out a very positive. Since it involved people, I can’t say it was perfect, but I will do my best to make 2019 more of the same. Those that have engaged Growth Dynamics to help them grow or at least change brought as much to me as I believe I brought to them. And as a result of that exchange we are all better for the time spent with each other.
My work with my clients is constantly connecting me to their upstream and downstream market partners both directly and indirectly. As I review and replay the conversations I have with the people I support and coach, one idea keeps popping up; the idea of curiosity. Are we all curious enough to be as effective as we can and should be in our business and sales processes?
