CHAPTER SIX
From Passion to Execution
“If one advances confidently in the direction
of his dreams, and endeavors to live that life which
he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected
in common hours. If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.”
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Consider the full range of suggestions we have made for anyone aspiring to be a top sales performer, as shown in Figure 6.1.
FIGURE 6.1
Blueprint for Top Sales Performance
There’s always room to improve. Even top performers will benefit from revisiting their current efforts in these areas and further sharpening their skills. For sales professionals with a more modest track record, these suggestions can become a roadmap for dramatically improving their performance. But the unfortunate reality is that most people will not improve. Most will read this book, give it some thought, take action in one or two modest ways, and return to the comfort zone of their old way of doing things. That’s the unfortunate truth for much of the multimillion-dollar sales training industry.
WHY MOST SALES PROGRAMS FAIL
People routinely return from sales seminars and workshops pumped up, often with armloads of workbooks and motivational MP3s. But all too often that enthusiasm fades soon thereafter. They may have taken some notes on crafting a more compelling elevator pitch, but they don’t practice that new pitch until it becomes part of their new and improved verbal repertoire. They make a dozen halfhearted efforts of the same sort, but the old patterns of thought and behavior reemerge, and they end up getting the same results they always got.
We have seen this happen in company after company. Considerable time, effort, and expense are put forth in carefully selecting a new matriculating class of salespeople. In a sales boot camp they are immersed in the subject. They are taught the ins and outs of their product line. They are given personality tests to identify their strengths and interests. They are handed sales scripts and told of ways to overcome objections; they are coached on their elevator pitches. They are given the steps for prospecting and building their pipeline. They now have the blueprint for their success. And the vast majority won’t follow it.
Some simply lack the passion. They don’t follow through on what they have learned and subsequent poor performance, job dissatisfaction, and turnover become part of their process of eventually discovering their passions and where those passions might fit. It’s a painful process for everyone involved: expensive for the employer in terms of underperforming sales and wasted money, and expensive for the employee in terms of emotional turmoil and wasted time.
But the problem isn’t always a lack of passion. It’s often a lack of understanding about how best to execute a plan based on that passion. Like hopeless romantics and absentminded professors, these middle-of-the-pack performers may have a passion and lofty goals, but they get distracted, or disdain the hard work, or lack the stick-to-itiveness to rebound after setbacks. In contrast, top performers are characterized by a sense of passion, to be sure, but also by a determination and effectiveness in execution. We pointed out earlier that passion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. It drives results not through some mystical New Agey think-it-and-it-will-happen process of manifestation, but because it so often inspires considerable, consistent, and effective action. Often, but not always.
Here’s a selling secret: Top performers are distinct not only for their passion but also because they do a host of little things that make it more likely they will be able to initiate and sustain those patterns of effective action.
COMPARE WEIGHT LOSS
TO SALES PERFORMANCE
Consider the parallels in weight loss—yes, weight loss. As with sales performance, the vast majority of people who try to lose weight aren’t terribly successful in the effort. But a few are, and their actions yield important clues to the nature of success.
After years of seemingly contradictory findings and conflicting dietary advice, a growing body of research has started to unlock the “secrets” of successful weight-loss maintenance, much of it conducted with the National Weight Control Registry, a database of individuals who have lost at least thirty pounds and kept it off for at least a year.1 The findings reinforce the idea that there’s only one fundamental rule to lasting weight loss: Burn off more calories than you consume. But people who maintain their weight loss do a host of little things differently that make it more likely they can balance the calories-in-versus-calories-out equation. These successful people do the following:
• Exercise more (averaging an hour a day).
• Weigh themselves more often.
• Usually eat breakfast every day (preventing diet-derailing midday hunger pangs).
• Have more social support.
• Stick to their eating and exercise regimens during the week and on weekends.
• Minimize the temptations in their environment.
• Find ways to cope effectively with stress and negative emotions.
• Effectively manage minor lapses, ensuring that they don’t snowball into total collapses.
• Set goals for themselves more frequently and more effectively.
The difference between maintaining one’s weight and regaining any weight lost is in part motivation (i.e., passion), to be sure, but also executional strategies. The same is true of the difference between top sales performers and their less productive counterparts.
But here’s the most interesting thing about this list of success enhancers: With the exception of eating breakfast and weighing yourself frequently, every item on the list has been shown to enhance sales performance as well. Besides the obvious physical benefits, exercise boosts your mood, reduces stress, and is associated with stronger academic and career performance. Those with strong networks of social support live longer, healthier, more productive, and more satisfying lives. In fact, social support doesn’t just “predict” these outcomes: It has a causal effect as well, even after controlling for preexisting physical conditions, income, age, education, smoking, drinking, exercise, blood pressure, cholesterol, access to health services, and satisfaction with life.
The essence of engaging in consistent, productive action—in other words, effective execution—is not particularly domain-specific. The same ideas and processes that lead to success in one area tend to be effective in others because they both have the ability to shape your life and life outcomes toward your passions.
SEVEN PRINCIPLES FOR MAKING IT HAPPEN
We’d like to end this book by sharing seven key principles for implementation and execution. Besides embracing passions, these are the defining characteristics that we have noted of top performers that keep them moving forward, that keep them from becoming idle dreamers and hopeless romantics who are full of passion but accomplish little.
1. Be bold. In most sales organizations, there are a handful of top performers who outsell the average performer—by a lot. Typically, they’re not selling 5 or 10 percent more. They’re selling five or ten times more. In meeting with them, we found it obvious that such a level of performance is important to them. Really important. They want it, and they recognize that dramatic action is required to achieve it. In a word, they’re bold. They’re not timid. We saw in Chapter 2 how these top performers are not necessarily life-of-the-party extraverts, but they’re hardly shy about taking action. They’re also not shy about telling people about their goals and ambitions—not to brag, but as a tool for keeping themselves accountable.
2. Be lucky. “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find that the harder I work, the more luck I have.” This thought has been attributed to everyone from Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn. The sentiment has been around for centuries longer, because it conveys a fundamental truth. These days, there’s a growing body of research revealing that, in fact, successful people are luckier than others. We reviewed much of this research in The New Elite, but for now we briefly mention one study in particular. People who considered themselves especially lucky and those who considered themselves especially unlucky were both given the task of looking through a newspaper and counting the number of photographs. On the second page of the newspaper, an entire half page had the headline “Stop Counting—There Are 43 Photographs in This Newspaper.” Lucky people saw the headline; those who considered themselves unlucky missed it. Dr. Richard Wiseman, author of this study, put it this way:
The harder they looked, the less they saw.
And so it is with luck—unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.2
Their boldness and higher activity level create more opportunities for top performers, and the openness that comes with their sense of luck makes sure that they see those opportunities as such. Pasteur was right: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
3. Be curious. Curiosity is the key to truly understanding your customers and prospects. Curiosity is also the lens through which you can spot trends, in both your industry and among your prospects and customers. You have to want to know: How are they feeling right now? What has been their path in life? What is it that makes them want to buy new china (or whatever) right now? When in doubt, we use these questions to facilitate our own sense of curiosity:
• How are you keeping yourself happy as a family in these tough times?
• What is it that makes purchasing so important right now?
• What can I do to help bring this to a close?
• What information and details would you really like to know?
Only by asking key questions and celebrating the answers can we have trends in our headlights, not in our taillights.
4. Seize opportunities in the moment. Seizing opportunities in the moment requires luck (seeing the opportunity), curiosity (exploring the opportunity), and boldness (taking action when the opportunity presents itself). All of these combine to produce a tendency to seize opportunities in the moment. At virtually every one of our training seminars we’ve heard the same story: One day, a prospect arrives (in the store, in the showroom, in your office, etc.). At first glance, for lack of a better word, the prospect is a bit . . . scruffy. In clothing and demeanor, this prospect just doesn’t seem to fit the typical profile. And when most of the sales associates look the other way, a top performer takes the chance and seizes the opportunity in the moment. And boldness is rewarded. He or she ends up getting a big sale (and usually a long-term customer), when others were turned off by first impressions.
Seizing opportunities in the moment requires being in the moment. You might be talking with your five hundredth prospect of the month, but for a new prospect, it is his or her first interaction with you. The individual wants to be evaluated for his or her own uniqueness, not through the lens of “customer number 501.” Be in the moment with each prospect.
5. Be a guide. We touched on this idea in Chapter 5, with the concept of a docent-led tour. Customers and prospects today want a knowledgeable guide. Sometimes, this guiding is literal—walking a customer through a store or dealership. But you can also be a guide through a complex purchase process. Consider, for example, the 4 Cs of diamonds: color, cut, clarity, and carat weight. By giving prospects a structure for thinking about the category, the 4 Cs provide a framework for making informed decisions about quality and value. Ask yourself: What are the 4 Cs of your category? How can you be a more effective guide through the process of making a purchase decision?
6. Set goals. Literally hundreds of studies—in sales, and in virtually every other aspect of life—have shown the performance-enhancing power of goals. It’s important to separate fact from fiction, however. In many sales books, and at even more sales training programs, the tale is told of the “Yale Study of Goals.” The story is simple. The 1953 graduating class at Yale was interviewed. Three percent of the students had written specific goals for their futures. Twenty years later, that 3 percent were found to have higher net worth than the other 97 percent combined. It’s a powerful story, but it turns out that the study is merely a “self-improvement urban legend.” When asked for details or a write-up of the study, the well-known self-help gurus and self-appointed sales “experts” could produce nothing. They had simply heard it from each other, repeating the story until it became an accepted part of sales lore.3
Urban legends are repeated for a reason, and in this case, it’s because the moral of the story is true: There is a deep underlying truth to the notion that setting goals can enhance success. But the research reveals a subtlety: The goals boost performance only if they are set and pursued in accordance with specific principles.4 First and foremost—and from what we have already seen, no surprise—is this: People perform best when they set goals consistent with their passions, values, and interests. This alignment of goals and passions has been shown to lead to harder work and better performance, but it also leads to enjoying the process more—more interest, excitement, confidence, creativity, energy, and happiness.
There are other characteristics of the goals set by high-achieving people; for example, they tend to set challenging, specific, near-term goals. Challenging goals provide the motivation to work hard. Specific goals eliminate the wiggle room of rationalizing a lack of hard work with an “I never really set that goal anyway” response. And near-term goals are particularly powerful, as they harness the burst of activity that occurs as a goal looms, a phenomenon known as the imminence effect. Sometimes sales quotas are too big and too far into the future to be truly motivating. When this happens, top performers often improvise a series of near-term, pipeline-focused goals (“My annual goal of $5 million in sales is too far in the future, so I set weekly goals for myself in terms of phone calls made and leads generated.”).
7. Be happy. We said it before, and it bears repeating: Be happy. In case you needed yet another reason, here’s one: Happy people achieve more. You might expect that success comes first—achieve your goals, and then you’ll get happy. In fact, more often than not, it is happiness that comes first. Happy people are more likely to find their passions, set more effective goals, work harder, and have more social support; the success comes as a result.5
A FINAL THOUGHT
In some of our sales training efforts, we give new sales associates the opportunity to spend time talking with top performers—a chance to learn at the feet of the master, as it were. Sometimes it is an insightful and motivating conversation for both. But too often, the new sales associates walk away from these conversations a little disappointed. They find the meeting disappointingly mundane. They were expecting to learn the secrets to sales success. They’re not exactly sure what they expected those to be—some secret handshake, hypnotic power, bit of verbal jujitsu, or easy-assembly instructions for a long list of rich people who really, really want to buy stuff right now.
Instead what they heard often sounds a little unspectacular—and disappointingly like a lot of work. If they listened closely, they probably heard something like, “Figure out what you really want from life. Then go for it. Find a job and an environment that fit well with your passions and strengths. Take steps to make them fit even better. Work hard. Set goals.”
Not glamorous advice on the surface, perhaps. But it is the best advice for anyone striving for success in sales. And in life. Finding one’s passion, and leveraging the thirteen expressions of it, will energize you and those around you. By sharing your passion, you will find success in life, no matter what you are selling and no matter what you wish to accomplish.