When I played rugby at Harvard, we had qualified for the National Sweet Sixteens. However, we were woefully unprepared for the level of competition to come our way. Fortunately, we brought in a very special coach, Sean O’Leary, to take our game to the next level. Rather than teaching us many different things to improve our game, he taught us one thing—unbreakable tackling.
Every day, he would drill us unendingly in an effort to get us to tackle at a level beyond what our competition had ever experienced. Ultimately, that strategy worked—we shut down every opponent’s offense with our unbreakable tackling and made it to the finals.
This experience has always been very instructive for me as a sales strategist. Most companies’ sales initiatives fail because they take on too much all at once. Stop trying to fix every aspect of your sales game. Rather, focus on just three areas, which I call your Game Plan Selling DSPTM:
Distinct: If you are perceived as similar to the competition in sales, you are as good as dead. From now on, when you are in front of a prospect, make it your goal to be perceived as totally distinct from the competition. If your competitors pitch their product, ask questions instead; if they are enthusiastic, just be genuine.
Systematic: Every component of your selling process should be scripted and systematic. You don’t want to think, you don’t want to create; you just want to follow the system. When you have a systematic approach to selling, sales becomes easy. Find your sales system and never leave it.
Prospecting Playbook: You never want to walk into the office on a given Monday and ask yourself what you should do this week in order to drum up sales. Instead, you should have a simple but consistent list of prospecting activities that will fill your prospect pipeline. Know how many prospecting calls to make, introductions to ask for, and sales meetings to set each day in order to achieve your sales goal.
By keeping your sales strategy simple, you focus only on the areas that make the most impact in your business. Implement your Game Plan Selling DSPTM to create your own Sales Sweet Sixteen.
How do you keep your sales strategy simple? Please share below in the comments.
Marc Wayshak is author of the book Game Plan Selling and a sales motivational speaker.
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About the Author Marc Wayshak
Marc is is the best-selling author of three books on sales and leadership, including the highly acclaimed titles Game Plan Selling, The High-Velocity Sales Organization and his forthcoming book, Sales Conversations, Mastered.
Marc is a contributor to Inc, HubSpot, Fast Company, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Huffington Post Business. He also hosts a popular YouTube channel on sales strategy with over 103,000 subscribers.
Marc helps thousands of people his data-driven, science-based approach to selling that utilizes all the best tools available to sales organizations today.
