Imagine coaching a basketball player, “All you have to do is master your foul shots, they are the single most important thing to win games.”
All of us, even those who don’t play basketball, would say this is ridiculous coaching. We would argue you have to master everything—dribbling, passing, inside and outside shots, defense, playmaking, and on and on. We immediately recognize that to be a great basketball player, you have to master everything.
Yet when we look at advice on on selling, it’s completely opposite. We are deluged with “Just do this one thing……” That thing, is whatever the person saying it happens to be selling you. Whether it’s whatever version of prospecting/demand gen, working our qualified pipelines, negotiating, closing, hunting, farming, or whatever.
The reality is, we have to do the whole job, all the time! Imagine if all you did was prospect. Pretty soon your pipeline is filled with opportunities, but they aren’t going anywhere. They are sitting in the pipeline, getting old and stale. Alternatively, we focus on the deals in our pipeline. Pretty soon it empties out, then what do we do?
We can’t do just one thing, because everything we do connects to or impacts everything else we are supposed to do.
Somehow, while we know we have to do the whole job, we keep looking for the one thing, a new technology that, like magic, enables us to make quota. The new training program, that transforms everything. The book, that changes our lives.
Top sales people do the whole job. They take responsibility for every aspect of their job. They don’t seek miracle cures. They seek to master all parts of the job, executing each in balance.
Sales is not easy, if easy is what you want, do something else.
Afterword: Our Sales Execution Framework (SEF) helps you understand how all the pieces/parts of high performance selling fit together. For a free copy of this white paper, just reach out.
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