Winning is Closer Than You Think

If you are like most sales professionals, this time of year marks a few things:

  1. Reaching and exceeding your goals and budget can seem very far away, even if you’re on pace.
  2. In addition, many organizations are asking salespeople to do more and do it differently.  Whether that’s new technology, systems, processes, products etc…

The combo of above can seem like “a lot”.   You might rightfully be thinking: I need to hit my budget by focusing on my key customers AND I have to get new customers AND I have to put it all in my CRM AND I have to make sure I’m communicating to everyone internally AND I am only at 50% of my budget (which is good, but doesn’t feel that way) AND I have to be watching the news for anything I can send my customers AND keeping in mind what my customers care about AND continuing educating myself on my products AND updating my LinkedIn AND giving referrals AND getting referrals AND I have to hit budget AND AND AND.

At times like this we can feel scattered and like we have too much to get done.  I have two suggestions and then a way we can judge if we are going in the right direction. First, two suggestions that come from Super Bowl winning coach Tom Coughlin:

  1. Be Where Your Feet Are – There a lot of important things you have going on, but the most important thing you can focus on, is the meeting you’re currently attending.
  2. Be on time – It’s one of the easiest things you can control.

If we start with those two behaviors for meetings, we will be moving in the right direction.  The metric I like to use to judge if the process is moving forward after a meeting is if we were able to set a follow up meeting, with action steps, at the end of the meeting.  If you can do this, it means three things:

  1. Our current and/or future customers value our solutions enough that they want to put time on their calendar to figure how to best work with us.
  2. They value us enough as a resource that they want to put time on their calendar to continue to be consulted by us.
  3. They are confirming you are on the same page for next steps.

The one thing we all must do if we want to set more follow up meetings is…ASK FOR IT!