Welcome to Commission Breath! The quick weekly newsletter that helps sales professionals stay on their game, and explores new ideas to improve their performance. If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, you can do so here.
Good morning friends.
Welcome to the first edition of Commission Breath!
We have a small cohort of people that sell a variety of B2B products/services. I’m excited to start this journey with you all, and hope this can grow into an interactive community to share ideas and experiences as we progress in our sales careers.
Each week I’ll discuss a sales related topic in a concise manner that will reinforce good habits I’ve learned, or propose new ideas to adopt. Following that is optional bonus content as a reward for making the time investment to better yourself 😎
For today’s kickoff edition, I talk about why having a sales process is important in the first place.
Let’s get to it.
“Trust the Process”
If your sales process is leading to a lot of closed sales, then hell yeah, trust it.
But…complacency can lead to mediocrity in the long term, so always think about what areas can be improved upon. And if you feel you should be closing more sales, then let’s take a step back and look at what a sales process really is:
The process by which you develop an opportunity from start to finish - whether that finish is closing the sale or closing the file.
Note that “closing the file” is part of the process. This is super important - because of course we want every opportunity to end in a sale, but successfully educating your prospect and getting a no should be viewed as a positive, not a negative. Why?
Benefits of getting a no:
Learn a lesson
Save time on bad prospect’s so you can focus on good ones
Getting a no should give you pause to analyze if there was something you could’ve done better that would’ve changed the outcome i.e. communicating something differently, building more trust, etc.
There could be a variety of reasons why it doesn’t make sense for a prospect to move forward, but if there was something you personally did wrong - at the very least, getting told no helps you learn.
Getting told no also helps you save time. I think we can all agree it sucks leaving endless voicemails, and sending follow-up email after follow-up email to a prospect that deep down, we know has ghosted 👻
“Just following up”
“Wanted to touch base”
“I’ll Venmo you if you could just plz reply”
How great would it be if all our ghosts actually just responded and said “Hey pal, I’m not intersted because of XYZ”.
BOOM! We could cross them off our list and sleep easy at night knowing they are not a customer in the immediate future.
I’ve been ghosted PLENTY of times (only in sales of course 😒), and while it’s an inevitable part of the job, I’m a firm believer that the better your sales process is, any sales you’re not closing will at least be closed files a.ka. you’ll get a no.
A tale of two sales processes:
Looking at the process comparison above, the bottom depiction shows what a disorganized sales process looks like.
It’s all over the place, you feel like a pest chasing your prospects, and it ultimately doesn’t even end in a yes or no, but with our good friend the ghost (*Queues up “Hello darkness my old friend...”)
The top depiction is what we should strive for. It’s a streamlined process that matches the expectations of your prospects from start to finish, and should result in a yes or no, not getting ghosted.
Granted, the most buttoned up sales process can still feel like a rollercoaster depending on the prospect. But their buying habits and behaviors aren’t in our control.
What’s in our control is how we run our sales process:
Filling the pipeline with qualified opportunities
Converting prospects to the next step
Closing sales or closing files
In future editions we’ll of course pick apart and explore various elements of the sales process, and specifically what can be done to avoid being ghosted.
But for now - take a look at your sales process as unemotionally and objectively as you can. Is the pipeline full? Are prospects not converting at a certain step?
Continuously asking these questions, and answering them honestly is the first step to getting your process looking like the straight line version depicted above.
The smoother your process, the better chance you and your team have at closing sales; and at the very least, getting a no when you don’t make a sale.
What do you Meme?
cc @jposhaughnessy via Twitter
Recently saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood which was directed by Tarantino…lol let’s hope 2020 doesn’t end like his movies do.
Interesting Finds
An Illustrative History of Emojis
Friday was world emoji day, as July 17th is the official holiday because of the calendar emoji 📅 . Scroll through the visual history of the icons we all love to use
If You're Offered a Seat on a RocketShip, Don't Say No
Great career advice from Cheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook
Trader Joe's Will Release a line of Cookie Butter Beer in September
I love beer. I love cookie butter. This is big news folks.
NBC Launches Peacock, It's New Streaming Service
That’s it. I can’t keep up with the streaming options these days. Questionable name in my opinion..but realistically will prob subscribe once The Office is locked on it 🤷
Food For Thought
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how to maintain consistent positive energy, not just ebbs and flows of it.
I found an article written by the host of one of my favorite podcasts. It talks about how looking forward to the future with a “goal setting” mindset actually sets us up to be unhappy outside of the specific moments of achievement. Instead, we should focus on “continuous” success.
A quote from within the article reads:
To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game… If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent pre-success failure.
This idea of continuous success is especially interesting to me as I’ve been a big advocate of asking questions like “Where do you want to be in 5 years?” and then working toward that.
This goes against the entire ethos of continuous success though.
A continuous success mindset is all about focusing on achieving daily goals rather than long-term ones. Doing so makes your day to day life much more enjoyable, and still leads to things that look like achievements from the outside.
When you have have some free time this week, I highly recommend reading the full post here.
Have a great week y’all
-Buck$
P.S.
Feel free to provide feedback by emailing me: pdbuck15@gmail.com . Open to any constructive criticism you have to offer - whether it’s on the sales insight, the format of the newsletter, or even the timing of it i.e. Monday mornings can be tough/busy