"You have to hear no nine times in order to get one yes."
How many times have you heard this phrase? Phrases like this are common in the sales world, but the most effective salespeople don't settle for those numbers. Instead, they create a mindset of continuous improvement to change those numbers.
It's crucial to figure out why we got a no or yes. If you call ten people and nine say no, but one says yes the first time through, that's okay. However, you should figure out why you got a no nine times, and only one person said yes. What did you do differently to get that yes?
One thing many of us don't do well enough is analyzing 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. There's a big difference.
Maybe you asked for the wrong person, or perhaps it was how you pronounced their name. Many things might vary from one call to the next. It's important to take note of those to improve consistently.
We have a client in manufacturing, and he talks about how much of 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—a process improvement set of techniques specific to manufacturing—after everything is finished. He answers that there's always another change to be made.
Sure, a process might significantly improve, but there will be other bottlenecks that they didn't see before because of bigger issues. It's a process of constantly learning and improving incrementally over time.
One of my counterparts at another Sandler office works with some NASCAR teams. Cameras record every angle of a pit stop, even the person putting gas in the car. After every pit stop, they review the film and analyze what they can do better on the next pit stop. The same level of analysis and improvement gets applied to every crew member 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 had heard it once, but they were the only team in that organization struggling at the time.
Working toward continual improvement 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.
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