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Sales

Travel Less, Prepare More

By Jack Malcolm / 5.14.2020 / No Comment

If you’re like the overwhelming majority of salespeople, you are no longer conducting in-person sales calls. There is at least one positive from this: your overhead cost in travel time to and from your customer’s location has been slashed to zero.

What are you doing with this extra time? It’s a precious gift, and I would like to propose one use for that time that could make a meaningful difference in your sales results.

Assuming you’re not squandering it by surfing the web or playing video games, there are two ways you can use your extra time productively. You can increase the quantity of your sales calls, or you can increase the quality of your sales calls. Both are good, but I personally would like to suggest more of the latter. Here’s how:

Convert travel time into preparation time. Use the time that you would have spent, and invest it preparation and planning for the sales call. In my own experience, I have found time spent in sales call planning to be the most highly leveraged use of my time. Sales call planning has enormous benefits:

It puts you in better control of the sales conversation.
It shows professionalism on your part, and your customers will notice the difference.
It primes your mind for outside-in thinking.
It arms you with contagious confidence going in.

Use the time before the sales call to research your customer in greater depth, to ask more pointed and specific questions, to elevate the conversation from a product-pushing pitch to a business-improving, problem-solving conversation.

Think carefully through your sales call plan template (and if you don’t have a sales call plan template, let’s talk.)

Use the time after the sales call that you would have spent returning to your office or traveling to the next call, and conduct a brief after action review. What went as expected? Differently than expected? Why? What did you learn form this? What will you improve or do differently next time?

The extra time you’re getting from not traveling to customer locations is found money. Whether you waste it or invest it is up to you.

Book reviews

Eight Extremely Functional Books that Can Help You Get Through This—and Beyond

By Jack Malcolm / 5.13.2020 / No Comment

I’ve always thought of books as tools. Every book serves some sort of function. In the big picture, the book may entertain, or inspire, or instruct. The books I list below have done all three functions for me in the past, and each has also benefited me in a specific way.

I’ve selected them because they may be especially useful during this time. I’ve listed them by function—eight ways to cope and even thrive during your enforced isolation:

Improve your habits

Whether you intend to or not, you will acquire new habits now that you’re stuck at home. You might as well have a say in what those habits are. Atomic Habits, by James Clear, will show you how to break bad habits and instill good ones. I previously reviewed it here.

Focus on what’s essential

While it may seem like you have more time on your hands, it’s so easy to fritter it away with trivialities. Essentialism, by Greg McKeown, will help you figure out what’s important and then cut out everything that does not directly contribute to that. I previously reviewed it here.

Work deeper

Chances are, you have much better control of your own schedule, without random people popping their heads into your cubicle or office. Now is a perfect time to improve your own productivity and creativity by immersing yourself deeply into your work, and Cal Newport shows you how in Deep Work.

Deal with stress

Stress is another constant that you can’t avoid, but did you know that stress can be good for you? The Upside of Stress, by Kelly McGonigal will show you why and how. I previously reviewed it here.

Put things in perspective

There is no better time than now to become acquainted with stoic philosophy. You should eventually learn about it from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but The Obstacle is the Way, by Ryan Holiday, is a very accessible starting point.

Give back

When everybody is hurting, some give and some take. Giving is better, not only morally, but also personally, but in Give and Take, Adam Grant gives solid advice on how to get more by giving more through networking, collaborating, developing talent, and communicating. I previously reviewed it here.

Filter out fact from fiction

We’re being flooded with a torrent of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies, and unfortunately our minds register the bad news stronger than the good. Factfulness, by the late Hans Rosling, will give you a mental toolkit to think more clearly—and realistically. I previously reviewed it here.

Get better

If you plan on taking time to learn a new skill or perfect an existing one, Practice Perfect can show you 42 best practices to improve you practice. I previously reviewed it here.

Success

Are You Contagious?

By Jack Malcolm / 5.11.2020 / No Comment

Apparently, very few things in nature are as contagious as the COVID-19 virus. That’s why we take such drastic precautions, because no one wants to catch it.

But there is something else in nature that can be even more contagious than a virus. It’s your attitude, or more precisely, your emotional state.

This is not just a metaphor—emotional contagion is a well-researched and established phenomenon. As Daniel Goleman tells us in his book, Social Intelligence, “Every interaction has an emotional subtext. Along with whatever else we are doing, we can make each other feel a little better, or even a lot better, or a little worse—or a lot worse…”[1]

Emotional contagion is similar to an actual virus in that it works invisibly, often beneath our conscious awareness. Our amygdala are highly attuned to emotional signals, especially negative ones, and in fact they extract emotional meaning microseconds before our conscious minds are aware of what we’re looking at. That’s why we can come away from an encounter with a vague sense of either happiness or sadness, without being able to explain why.

Unlike a real virus, distance is no protection. You can infect someone half a world away, whether they’re simply reading your email, hearing your voice, or seeing you on a Zoom call.

So what does this mean to you? Depending on whether you have a good attitude or a bad one, you either want to prevent its spread or encourage it. If you go into a call with a customer with an attitude of discouragement or desperation, you will infect them with your attitude. If you go into a call with the confidence in your ability to help them, you will also infect them with your attitude. It’s especially important if you’re a leader; you’re a “superspreader” because everyone pays inordinate attention to everything you say and do.

But here’s where the coronavirus comparison hits a brick wall. Most importantly, emotional contagion is not potentially lethal. Second, it can be controlled or even used for good.

Take active control of your emotional state. Self-awareness is the closest thing to a vaccine against emotional contagion. Be mindful; look inside yourself and name the emotion you are feeling. It’s called labeling, and this simple act places your executive functions back in control. If the emotion you’re feeling is not the one you wish to portray during this next conversation or meeting, try to change it.

If that’s too difficult, at least try to pretend you’re feeling upbeat even if you’re not. Put on a smile even if you don’t feel like it. Lift your chin, put some enthusiasm in your voice, and take a sincere interest in the other person. In a phenomenon called embodied cognition, our minds often read signals from our bodies, so “fake it ‘til you make it” is actually sound advice.

Emotional contagion works both ways, so you also have to think about guarding against catching others’ negative attitudes. Again, it begins with self-awareness. If you have a good handle on your own internal feelings, you can counteract the “vibes” you’re getting from the other person. If you think the other person will listen, you can label the emotion you’re sensing and ask them about it.

In the end, it all boils down to personal responsibility. There is enough negativity spreading around, and we can’t control all of it. But we can each determine to avoid being part of the problem and perhaps make a small contribution toward a solution. If you can’t avoid being contagious, at least be contagious in a way that helps you and others!

[1] Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, p. 14.

Uncategorized

Sales Training in a Pandemic

By Jack Malcolm / 4.29.2020 / No Comment

This pandemic is teaching me that sometimes “constraints” can be turned into advantages.

Like everyone else in the training business, my client engagement calendar got vaporized starting the second week of March. One casualty was a full week of training that I had scheduled in Christchurch, New Zealand, for the end of last month. However, the client felt that the training was too important to put off entirely, so we worked out a plan to conduct the training virtually.

We both were confident that I could adapt the material to make it work in a virtual training environment, but we were not prepared for what we have seen so far.

We are now halfway through the material that I had planned to cover in face to face training, and every one of the sessions has gone better than almost any live training sessions I’ve delivered, when measured in one important way: how well are the participants picking up and demonstrating the skills taught?

My training has always been very hands-on, requiring the thoughtful completion of templates to identify and quantify the value that their products or services bring to their customers, and of course a lot of realistic role plays to translate that into effective sales conversations. In these sessions, I’m seeing more complete and deeply detailed work, and better execution during the role plays—certainly better than average.

One telling moment for me was when I checked with a team in one of the breakout rooms and noted that their work was not only spot on, but amazingly complete. I said as much, and one of them admitted that they had worked on the exercise before class started. “That’s cheating,” I said, “and I wish more of my students did that!”

Of course, so far the sample size has been too small to derive any definitive conclusions, but perhaps it’s worth considering what’s different and see if we can figure out what’s causing the improvement. Here are the main differences:

Smaller chunks of training, so they could master one concept and-or related skill at a time. When clients have students and facilitator travel physically to a location, it makes sense to use as much of the time we have available together. That leads to day-long sessions, with a lot of material being presented. Now, we are limiting each session to two hours.
Students got to “cheat” by getting with the material ahead of time. They get pre-reading and a condensed video of the lecture they are about to receive during the live virtual session.
One week between sessions, in which they follow up on work they did in the session, send it to me for additional feedback, and get to practice the techniques with live clients in the interim.

What has stayed the same?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that I can still get the same level of engagement and class participation as in a live session. There are times I ask a question and don’t get a response, but then I just pick one of the faces on the screen and direct the question to that person. That keep everyone’s attention.
The breakout room feature on Zoom allows teams to break into smaller groups for workshops, and I can pop in and out to see how people are doing, just as in a traditional classroom environment.

It’s working well on both sides. Their boss tells me his sales team looks forward to the weekly sessions. On my part, I’m probably working harder on virtual sessions than live ones, because of the preparation time between sessions. But as compensation, I do get to bypass the glamor and excitement of air travel, and that’s a trade I will gladly make most of the time![1]

In the face of sudden change, our best tools are adaptability, resiliency, and imagination. Without them, we face extinction. With them, we can survive and even thrive—and emerge stronger than before.

[1] Even if I don’t get to visit New Zealand for the moment.