How many times have you heard the phrase, "You have to hear no nine times in order to get one yes"? Phrases like that are pretty common in the sales world, but the most effective salespeople don't settle for those numbers. They create a mindset of continuous improvement and try to change that number.
Most of us don't take enough time to figure out why we got a no or why we got a yes. If you call ten people and nine say no and one says yes the first time through, that's okay. But then you should try to figure out why you got a no nine times and then one person said yes. What did you do differently to get that yes?
One thing many of us don't do well enough is analyze body language and tonality from one call to the next. The difference between a no and a yes is often something tiny like that, rather than a metamorphic difference.
Sometimes it's coincidental timing. There's a big difference between having a conversation with someone in the fifth month of their six-month contract and having that conversation in the first month. Big difference.
Maybe you asked for the wrong person, or perhaps it was the way you pronounced their name. There are a number of things that might vary from one call to the next, and it's important to take note of those in order to continually improve.
We have a client in manufacturing, and he talks about how much manufacturing is focused on continual improvement. It's huge in that industry! He said he sometimes gets asked what happens to the person certified in Six Sigma after everything is finished. And his answer is that there's always another change to be made.
Sure, a process might get significantly improved, but there will be other bottlenecks that show up that they didn't see before because there were bigger issues. It's a process of constantly learning and constantly improving incrementally over time.
One of my counterparts at another Sandler office works with some NASCAR teams. There are cameras recording every angle of a pit stop, even the person putting gas in the car. And after every pit stop, they review that film and analyze what they can do better on the next pit stop. The same level of analysis and improvement gets applied to every member of the crew and the driver.
But they weren't applying it to sales. The sales team said, "We've already talked about prospecting, and we're good." Their mindset was that they had it figured out because they heard it once. And they were the only team in that organization that was struggling at the time.
Working toward continual improvement with no actual finish line for when the work is done is a mindset in most industries except sales. If you really want to get better in sales, you have to dissect your process. If you're not, you're wasting time, money, and energy.
