What is the Secret of Sales?
I want to share with you what I believe is the simplest secret to success in all sales.
It can be applied to just about anything and everything in life.
Now we’re going to use the context of selling here to talk about the idea because one of the things that we have started to help our clients with when they get to Phase 4 in our Brand Builders journey. We take people through the four phases and when they get to Phase 4, they start turning their personal brand into a real business.
And one of our curriculums is called Scale Your Sales. It’s about how to build a true sales team and what are all the functions and the mechanics that you must have to deploy and implement as a business owner. If you want to create a true sales team in the sales function of your business, this is one of the curriculums, but what’s powerful about this is that it is also the curriculum that you must do as an individual if you want to be successful in sales.
And as I mentioned, it is the one thing that I believe that you must do to be successful in anything.
First, let’s talk about what it is not because I think many people have a lot of presuppositions, assumptions, or beliefs about what they think will lead to success in sales.
A lot of times people rely on willpower. They think that they need to have enough willpower to overcome the sheer amount of rejection that they are going to receive.
Or they feel like they have to be lucky. That sales is a game of luck. Hopefully, I’ll randomly say the right things, and somebody will say yes.
Sometimes they even think that success in sales is the result of skill.
Now I’m a big fan of skill. We’re a big fan of teaching skills.
We have another curriculum called Pressure Free Persuasion, where we teach the actual skill of what we consider to be ethical sales.
But I would say that even your skill is not what ultimately is the simplest and the strongest determinant of success in sales.
The Importance of Routine
The simplest secret to success in sales is your routine.
Routines lead to results.
There’s a lot of different words that you could use for routines here. You could use the word habits. You could use the word schedule. You could use the word calendar.
We said this, in my very first book Take the Stairs, which was what most people do is they put their self-esteem in their results.
You can’t put your esteem in your results because results are sometimes there and sometimes not.
What successful people do is put their self-esteem into their work habits rather than their results.
They put their focus into the things that they can control, which is the activity that they’re doing all day, every day.
They focus and they put their energy and their self-esteem into it.
Did I show up and did I execute the activities? Did I execute the behaviors? Did I spend my time doing the things that I know will lead to results? Even if those results didn’t show up today.
What most people do is, when they have results, they feel good. When they don’t have results, they feel bad but that’s not what ultra-performers do.
What ultra-performers do is they show up each day because they know that it is routines that lead to results.
They focus on their routines.
They focus on consistency.
They focus on the activity that will drive results over time.
Now, if you’re building out a sales team or you’re building out a sales function of your business, whether it’s just for yourself, or maybe you have one other salesperson or a team, or whether you have thousands of salespeople, this same thing is true. The understanding of if routines lead to results, then one of the most valuable parts of a true predictable revenue sales system scaling your sales is creating schedules for your salespeople to follow.
How are they spending their time? What are the things they are doing every single day?
What you do every day matters much more than what you do once in a while.
Your results are not a reflection of what you do occasionally. Your results are a reflection of what you do on a routine basis.
If you are the CEO, if you’re the head of sales, if you are a one-person selling machine or you’re a solopreneur, and you’re just in charge of selling, what you must do is you have to decide how much time are you going to allocate to what types of activity on a routine basis.
It is routines that lead to results.
That is telling your sales team, whether that’s you or one other person, or a hundred other people, how to spend their time.
This is one of the parts of a predictable revenue system, which is what scaling your sales is all about. It is telling them literally how to spend their time.
What percentage of their time should be spent on different activities? Such as following up with past clients, prospecting for new clients, asking for referrals, studying self-development and motivation, entering their activity into CRMs, attending weekly meetings, etc. All these things make up the role of a salesperson.
And you should not, I repeat, you should not leave it up to chance to let your salespeople try to figure out how they should spend their time.
Now, it doesn’t mean you have to be so controlling or micromanaging, but it does mean you should have a good idea of recommended routines of a recommended schedule in a recommended way that they should use their time every single week.
And if you’re the salesperson, then you better have some time blocked on your calendar to do the activities that are necessary to generate revenue.
If you don’t have the time blocked on your calendar to do the necessary activities that are required to generate revenue, don’t be surprised when revenue doesn’t show up, right?
Sales is not about luck. It’s not about magic. It’s not about skill. It’s not some mystical art form that is only available to few people who can understand it.
It is a scientific process.
It is a systematic process.
It is a structured set of levers that you can pull in your business to drive more revenue.
And one of those levers is that you better know how much time needs to be spent on each activity.
One of the things you need to know is what are the key activities that need to take place and what volume of each of those activities are necessary to achieve the outcome of the sales that you desire?
That’s a whole separate process. That’s something that we refer to as the scorecard, which is figuring out what those activities are and how do you reverse engineer them to know how much time you and or your sales team need to be spending on them. You can learn more about that at the Scale Your Sales event.
But what I would say is you need to know that information and you need to plot it on a calendar. You need to plot it on a schedule. You need to have a recommended routine that your sales team follows.
If you leave it up to them, they’re going to be all over the place. It doesn’t mean they’re bad salespeople or that they’re failures. It doesn’t mean they can’t be successful. It doesn’t mean you hired the wrong person. It means they’re human.
Most humans give in to their emotions. They give in to their feelings. They give in to what they feel like doing right now. You must take that off the plate.
You must take that out of the equation by giving them a recommended routine, a structured schedule, and an explicit, detailed recommendation of how they spend their time because routines lead to results.
How about you? Do you have a set routine to schedule that you follow? How has that been working for you? Let me know in the comments below.
