Refiring the Sales Wheel
No disputing it, our good-old sales wheel rocks! If you’re new to sales, it goes like this…… wake up, eat, drink, prospect, contact, visit, ferret, ferret, praise, ferret, present, close, eat, service, service, referrals, eat, drink, fall asleep, rinse and repeat.
What on Earth could improve its gleam and glory? Well, let’s consider the term close. What are we closing? A deal? A door? How might the term come across to new salespeople? More accurately it represents a beginning. As it stands, the term could become buried in our subconscious and operate like an affirmation – attaching us to the polar opposite of what we really want and a self-imposed trigger against our best efforts. Instead, how ‘bout we flip the term from ‘sales close’ to ‘sales open? After all, aren’t we opening relationships, opening a new customer account, and opening doors toward a prosperous, life-long partnership?
Next, let’s consider how salespeople are trained, or more so here on what and how we are first trained. As for most, the first step usually involves being thrown headlong into prospecting. The basic ‘how to prospect’ assertion is usually, “You can’t sell anything till your (prospecting) funnel is full!”. And this is true. To a point. But let’s consider a concept born when some kids took an interest in the game of chess to the next level.
A leading US psychology author and speaker Adam Grant covers ‘scaffolding’ brilliantly in his book Hidden Potential. Grant explains how deconstructing the game of chess opened a new approach to train the brain and took a team of underprivileged and socially challenged teenagers all the way to the US Chess Championships. And winning. Pivotal to success was them not being trained on the rules of the game, or the game’s history, or strategies, or opponent tactics, but instead on the game backwards (or almost backwards). The kids were encouraged to drill and drill and drill with only a few remaining chess pieces, as would be closely representative of the late phases of a real game. In time, the lads became experts in close combat determining a winner and loser.
While the board game’s other traditional coaching elements remain important, it was considered immersing the players in the endgame that fundamentally made the difference. Each player not only became experts in tail-end tactics, but the act of repeating developed their connection to the game as a whole and helped build resilience to persist in the face of almost certain disaster.
Traditional chess coaching still encourages players to learn from their mistakes, but inevitably more from earlier game phases, and offering less opportunity to learn when close to the chequered flag. More time and experience train the subconscious to meld to their consciously driven desire and premise not only to win but being well-prepared approaching the finish line. This embodiment works automatically inside the mind which paves the way for the scenarios of the universe to unravel back to the start of the game, and (somewhat magically some might say) deliver the right set of scenarios to achieve that position best suitable for the final fight. A player’s mind opens and automatically vacuums or demands those scenarios which best support a player’s desire to win. Sounds a lot like our sales assumed-close.
As here, the elevating of a tactical advantage to a strategic level is not new. Napolean Bonaparte was considered a genius using artillery to form full-scale battle plans. Coke used ‘Oh, what a feeling’. Many corporates still do the same today. And, if it works with fizzy drinks and board games, then why not with the sales game? As suggested previously, this would involve managers focusing their training first on the last piece of the sales puzzle – a fruitful step, least of which having sales cadets confident at the most critical phase of the game.
Modern positive psychology also supports this approach. Coaches and sales trainers have apprentices immersed in those ‘ending’ scenarios. Of course, we are still ‘closing’ the whole way through, but nearly always there looms a decision process of sorts for which is usually impossible to predict or plan, and precisely why being comfortable pushing our chest out approaching the finish line is so important.
Further crosspollinating of modern psychology with the sales wheel tends to suggest some spokes open for further consideration. Refining present day coaching content and delivery style would be a bare minimum. We’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, anyone lurking around in here who’d like a hand, please get in touch. Help is available.