Sales is a craft that improves with practice

If you are reading this post there is a very good chance that you are in sales of some sort. And if you are in sales…of some sort, you probably received some training along the way…of some sort.

With the training you received you may have also received continuing education credits that were probably the driving force behind taking the class to begin with. But if the class you took was worth the time that you  invested it hopefully included some points regarding how to keep busy selling and not just how to sell.

The how-to part is not generally what makes us different from each other. It is the between the actual act of selling that really differentiates us from one another. The things we do that take up the time between face to face selling opportunities that allows one person to sell three times more homes or mortgages or whatever we sell than the person sitting in the office next to us.

Does anyone think fabulously wealthy and famous singers only sing when they get on stage? Is there a person among us that believes Tom Brady (Patriots Quarterback) only throws the football on Sundays?

These people are practicing their skills so that when they are in the moment they can take full advantage of that moment. They do not wait for the moment and then decide to go for it and hope for the best results. This same thing applies to the art and skill of selling. Selling is a craft and when taken seriously the craft applied can change the lives of the people that we sell to. What do most people do between sales appointments?

The truth is not very much. The truth is that most people don’t do anything to improve the outcome of their next sales opportunity. They instead become distracted from their goals and allow outside influences to drain them of energy and more importantly their time.

Instead of staring at the coffee pot, watching each drop hit the surface of the coffee or reading about people on Facebook that we don’t know do things that we won’t remember, what if we organized our prospects and called each of them every other day to see how their home search is progressing and making polite conversation to see how we could help them reach their goals?

What if instead of talking to the chatty Cathy receptionist about her boyfriend issues we designed an email campaign that touched each of our prospects once a week with some value added information?

There is a good chance that the world may collapse under the pressure of the intense focus that we pay to our jobs or we could become wildly successful and learn a score of new and useful habits. I will try to practice what I preach after the coffee pot completes its magic and report the results after I find out if Cathy has finally broken it off with her boyfriend;-)