More Ways to Win

Instilling Competitive Rituals

By Jeremy Miller

All great performers have rituals. Rituals are often the key difference between an amateur athlete with lots of natural talents and a gold medal Olympian. Great sales people are like elite athletes; they too have rituals. They consistently do the right things: prospecting, managing their funnel, presenting value and closing. They manage their activities with precision. People often describe elite sales people as machines, because they just have a knack of consistently hammering out their calls.

Have you ever asked a sales person how many prospecting calls they make every day? The numbers I usually hear are between 20 to 25 calls per day. Yet research with technology firms show that an average large account sales person only makes 3 to 5 calls per day. That is a big gap! The result is inconsistent sales or missed quotas.

Prospecting is about turning the crank. Most sales people don't like it or avoid it, because it is just hard work with no immediate gratification. It's kind of like going to the gym on a regular basis. If we neglect our health and fitness we get fat, and if we neglect the top of our sales funnel we miss quota. By ritualizing prospecting you will take the sting and the effort required in picking up the phone to find companies that can benefit from your products and services.

Rituals are powerful vehicles of performance. Do you have "brush your teeth" written in your daily calendar? Probably not. You just do it. It's a ritual. There are plenty of rituals in your life that you do every single day without giving it a second thought: buying your morning coffee, kissing your spouse goodbye or going to your kid's soccer game. Rituals are the behaviors in our lives that are programmed. They are extremely powerful, because they pull us into action while conserving energy. In contrast, managed activities that require will, discipline and self-control are pushing you into action. They require forethought and energy to initiate.

Will and discipline are far more limiting than any of us realize. Even small acts of self-control expend a great deal of energy. Calling on self-control must be used very selectively. Think back to failed New Year's resolutions or goals that you shot for and missed. Many times we miss these goals, because they required a great deal of self-control for a prolonged period of time. The goal to lose weight by spring may start out with a nice new gym membership, a diet plan and maybe even a personal trainer. It goes great for about two weeks, and then something comes up. A late meeting and we miss the gym. Then another challenge and another, and finally we are back to our old routine and another missed resolution.

Building positive rituals is very similar to the process we use to strengthen our muscles. To strengthen your biceps or triceps requires subjecting them to regular stress and recovery. The same training regimen applies to building a ritual of effective prospecting. Timing and precision are at the core of building a new behavior. By determining when, where and how a behavior will occur, we will no longer have to think about getting it done. By taking the time to build your routine with a list of who you are going to call, when you are going to call them and what is going to be said will dramatically improve the probability of making your calls.

Roger, a very successful benefits consultant, has a rapidly growing practice. Roger makes 100 dials every week like clock work. He divides his business development time into three two-hour sessions per week. The ritual is very structured. Through trial and error he has found the value proposition, the number of dials and the steps it takes to maximize effectiveness of his prospecting. Roger explains, "I don't put much pressure on myself. I am doing these calls to build relationships for the future. The people I am calling today will be my active opportunities eight months from now." Roger doesn't have to think about making his calls every week; he just does them.

To get to Roger's level of prospecting doesn't happen over night. Too often people try to implement a new routine, but try to do too much too soon and inevitably fail. Change requires moving beyond our comfort zone, and is best initiated in small, manageable increments. Focus on one significant change at a time, and set reachable goals at each step of the process. If you haven't picked up the phone in two months and want to get into cold calling, it doesn't make sense to trying to call 30 people a day, five days a week. Your odds of success are far higher if you begin with a specific, but carefully calibrated prospecting plan. That might be making five prospecting calls between 10:00am and 11:00am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then increasing the pace every subsequent week. Growth and change won't occur unless you push past your comfort zone.

Building a prospecting ritual may sound rather rudimentary, but look at the statistics. Marguerite McLeod, president of the Results Source – a lead generation and appointment setting firm, states, "From our experience it takes 8.4 dials to reach a person, and 2% of all calls return in a meeting." This part of selling is very much a numbers game, but is often pushed off for a variety of reasons: waiting for leads from marketing, servicing existing customers, going after the web traffic, or just chasing easy prospects. These sources are great for the immediate, but they don't generate long-term predictable results or sales people who consistently double their quota.

People often confuse rituals with time management techniques. Time management is an act of self-control, and does nothing to manage long-term performance or conserve energy. Ask an elite athlete how they manage their day, and you will hear a description of, "I get up. I eat. I train. I eat some more, and then train some more. Then I sleep." Eat, train and sleep is how they view their lives, but when you look more closely they operate in a series of rituals that gets them ready for that opportunity to show the world what they are capable of. Great sales people use rituals in much the same way. Prospecting, or failure to prospect, is the difference between an average sales person and a great one. You will know when you have achieved a ritual of effective prospecting when you automatically make your calls every week, but more importantly find the time to make the calls regardless of how busy your schedule is.

Jeremy Miller (Jeremy.Miller@LEAPJob.com) is a Partner with LEAPJob (www.LEAPJob.com), a recruiting and consulting firm. LEAPJob helps its clients build top performing sales teams. You can reach Jeremy at 905.281.3090, Ext. 22.