Imagine you get into your car in the morning and forget how to start it. You are there, holding your key, looking at the dash but don’t know what to do next. You stick the key in the cigarette lighter, nope that didn’t work, you take the key and scratch it along the dash, nope that didn’t work either, you just so happen to stick the key in the ignition and it fits! Perfect! Now what? You press the horn but nothing; you move your seat back but still nothing. Then you turn the key and all of a sudden the car starts! Yes! But now you are sitting in a running car… what do you do next? Hmm you roll up and down the window but nothing happens... you turn on the windshield wipers but still you sit there. Then finally you just so happen to take the car and put it into drive! Yes! But you have to back out of your driveway...
It’s a ridiculous scenario right? Who wouldn’t know how to operate a car? But in reality, we were all taught at some point that exact process. You get into the car, put the key in the ignition, pop it into drive and you are off. We have a process for pretty much everything, even making toast: take the bread out, put it in the toaster, and turn the toaster on. We even have a process for putting our clothes on; one foot at a time, or one arm at a time. So my question is do you in your sales job actually have a process?
I talk to companies all the time that have a process in marketing, a process in finance, a process in service, even a process in hiring someone but when it comes to sales they hand over a sheet of leads and say - make calls. It’s like taking a kid, putting them in a car, handing them a key and saying drive.
Here’s a line I have heard before - Our sales people have been doing it for a long time, they had their own process and we don’t need to mess with that. My question would be - Do they all have the same process? Are they all doing the same amount of sales? Is that process actually working? And if everyone is dong something different who’s right and who’s wrong?
At Sandler we teach a sales process, think of it as we teach you how to drive a car but where you take that car, how fast or how slow you drive or even what you put on the radio is completely up to you. A lack of process just opens up the possibility of making mistakes but why make mistakes if the mistakes have already been made by someone else and have been learned from? That’s the basis of the Sandler process, David Sandler already made the mistakes and figured out ways around them and that’s exactly what we teach.
Want to hear more? Contact us for a complimentary 20-minute coaching session.
