323: Selling Is All About The Basics

<p style="font-weight: 400;">We are starting the New Year and have we decided how we will start it?  Are we going to just slide back into our old habits and pick up the threads of the deals we were working on before the break?  Or are we going to do some fresh thinking about what we are doing and how we are doing it?  As salespeople, we are all massively time poor. That sets off a series of decisions where we are constantly cutting corners to shave off some time.  Unfortunately we also shave off some activities we shouldn’t be minimising.  Deciding how we are going to work as a professional this year is a good discipline.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Selling has some very consistent requirements.  There are the basics and they must be perfected.  When we sit back and look at our activities and behavior, we are bound to find areas where we have deleted necessary activities or truncated them.  As we get back to work we need to make a commitment to ourselves to become more professional this year, than the level we achieved last year.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">That means studying the art of sales.  We need to break it all down and minutely examine what we are doing at each stage of the sales cycle.  We are reading what other sales leaders are doing, searching for ideas and new information.  Business is in a constant flux and technology is a tremendous enabler of business.  What have been the latest advances and how can we adopt these into the sale’s process?</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Habits are both great and dangerous.  Poor habits need to be eliminated and replaced with better habits.  Changing a habit however needs a tremendous amount of lifting to get it done.  The rationale has to be very strong, otherwise we won’t sustain the effort needed.  Exactly what better or new habits do we want to introduce and what is our strategy to make them stick.  Just wishing that habits improve is delusional, because nothing will change without some application of dynamite to blow up the bad habits.  We need a p