Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] One of the things I found a lot of people talk about being strategic. They talk about having process.
[00:00:06] And what happens is that process is there. It's there until something goes wrong, until the end of a quarter or until the end of the year. And a lot of times what I would find is that sales leaders themselves would be the biggest reason why their teams would move out of a disciplined process of planning, preparation, practice, and then playing to just living in play to living in transactional.
[00:00:31] I'm Dennis Sorensen and this is the Think Big, Win Bigger podcast. This is the podcast for sales leaders and salespeople who know they're capable of more and are looking for a system that is predictable, repeatable, scalable and forecastable for growth. It's not theories, it's not motivational speeches. It's an ambitious way to operate your business.
[00:00:54] Today I want to talk a little bit about plan, prepare, practice, play, what I call being process driven in sales. In the last episode, I really talked about building a winning sales culture. And I really feel like a winning sales culture is very important to the organization. And part of establishing what we want in terms of our process driven sales organization is how we think, how we think about our entire process, how we carry ourselves through that process. And I mentioned in the last episode that one of the keys to shaping my thinking on this was a book by Dr. Bob Rotella called How Champions Think. And in How Champions Think, Bob Rotella really highlights that exceptional people are process driven not because they don't care about the outcomes, but because they know that the best outcomes come through process. And in How Champions Think, we really learn about the things that make people exceptional and what we want to be able to do. What I wanted to be able to do in sales and with my sales teams was be able to accept certain lessons from how champions think and bring those to bear of the sales operation. One of the first lessons that I learned from that book is really about refusing to place limits on yourself and refusing to place limits on what's possible for you. And as I mentioned, this shaped my thinking again around ambition. Ambition thinking who's better than you and why. That's the question you've got to ask when you think about the placing limits on yourself.
[00:02:23] You got to understand that you've got to be able to open up your aperture and be able to think about all the possibilities that are out there for you and not let yourself be limited by the things that so many salespeople let themselves be limited by. You want to be able to choose big dreams and set high goals for yourself, not accept mediocrity. You want to dream big and you want to back it with goals and process.
[00:02:48] Exceptional people go well beyond dreaming. Plenty of people with dreams never accomplish anything. Knowing that attitude is critical to your success. And be able to bring great performance by being optimistic, by being persistent, by being strong willed in the things that you do. Exceptional is never easy. If it was easy, many more people would accomplish it. One of the key things too is understanding that in order for us to have a championship mindset, in order to be process driven, we want to take control of all the controllables that are in our sales process.
[00:03:25] And that's what we try to do. By being very process driven, we want to also understand that preparation creates confidence. If we want to be confident about pursuing really big outcomes with our customers, to be able to bring value driven outcomes to those customers, we have to understand that preparation is a big part of it. And it's why prepare is the second P in the four P's that I talk about in being process driven. And also that practice which is the third P is really key. That we have to be very intentional about practicing. Not because we want repetition, but because we want to continually build that sales muscle that we need throughout this process.
[00:04:08] We want to have every repetition having a purpose and that we don't just go through the motions. That we want to be preparing ourselves and practicing in every situation that we're going to be in in sales. And I think that practice is really one of the elements that I lear very early on at NCR Corporation. In practicing is one of the things that I think is the most missing pieces of the four Ps today in sales, in the teams that I've led and in the customers that I work with, the clients that I work with.
[00:04:37] Practice is really the missing element of being process driven. One of the things that I learned at NCR Corporation years ago was that it was through that practice that we really got better.
[00:04:49] We used to practice with our sales leaders. We would rehearse and really role play ahead of our sales calls and the and the interactions that we were going to have with the customers. When we were first in sales training, we were recorded and we watched ourselves back giving presentations. We watched ourselves in role play and we looked at all the things that we can do. We really did what really great athletes do and that is that we studied the film, right? And I think practice is a key element of what we want to be able to do in being process driven in sales. And we've got to make sure that we execute that. When we're executing, we stay fully present. We detach from the past. We don't let things from the past. Things that have gone wrong for us, we let those go. If we have a bad day or we have a bad sales call, we got to be able to learn from it and move on from it. We can't carry those things around with us in our mindset, As I said earlier, we got to control the controllables. And the first thing that we have control over is our decisions and our behavior, our habits, the level of effort that we bring to it, and our mindset. Last time I mentioned this idea of having a growth mindset, that's absolutely something that we can control. And the other thing that I find in really successful sellers is that they. They don't hear the noise. They don't get caught up in the negative. They refuse to listen to the negative.
[00:06:12] One of my cousins is a really successful seller. And one of the days I was speaking with my uncle about my cousin and how successful my cousin was in his sales efforts, and I asked my uncle what really makes him different than the others that he works with. And my uncle told me that it is because he refuses to listen to anything negative. If anybody's talking negatively about whether it could be the economy or the sales environment or customers or whatever it might be, he refuses to listen to that. He doesn't allow the negative in because he controls his mindset. And so one of the things we've gotta be able to do in this process is we've gotta be able to control our mindset. The other thing that really successful sellers do is that they simplify under pressure. They really try to break the game down into its basic components. And that's why I think I was so attracted, and I mentioned this in the last episode to Mike Weinberg's books because it's in the title, New Sales Simplified Sales Management Simplified. Because under pressure in sales, you want to be able to make sure that you're focused on doing the basics, that you're focused on creating, advancing, and closing. And one of the things that really makes that a lot easier to do is if you have a really good process, and it's a process that you're really committed to, and it's a process that you follow every time, even when things get hard, when you have setbacks, that you stick to your process. You trust in your process. You trust in what the results that the process will yield. The other thing that I think is really Key is a commitment to continuous action, right? We want to have the habits of being very active in what we do in sales. We just keep moving forward in spite of whatever happens and what comes across to us. We want to make sure that as we become process driven and we think about then what process driven means.
[00:08:03] So process driven in my. The way that I define it is really plan, prepare, practice, play the four P's.
[00:08:10] So we want to think about it as a continuum, right? We want to think about it as a cycle that we just constantly go through in terms of planning and preparation and practice and play. Planning for us is when we really want to look at building our ambition plan and building our strategic account plan. So our ambition plan, again, we define what our total potential inside the account is. Once we know what that total potential is, we build that potential into our strategic account plans. We begin to define everything that we need to do. We need to start to define all the strategies that we're going to need to pursue. We set our goals for the account, we establish the objectives in the account, and we then define those strategies that are going to lead us to where we want to go in achieving our goal, our objectives and our goals. And that helps us then to be able to understand all of the different steps that we need to take in the sales process, to be able to do this. And as we do this and we do it consistently again, we begin to build that sales muscle memory that we need to be able to be able to be more productive in sales and to be able to scale what we're doing. As we go through our planning process, we begin to also go into our preparation process. Because our preparation process really feeds a lot of the planning work that we do. Those two things really work off of each other really well. Because part of preparation is really all of the research, all of the information that we need together about our customers. And then preparation is also about beginning to build the ass the sales assets that we need to be able to go be effective in executing that strategy. And when you think about building those sales assets, we want to be able to remember that our sales story is our most important sales asset. It's the sales asset that's going to be the thing that changes the game for us.
[00:09:56] And what I find in an organization is that while many companies talk about being process driven, they don't live it. And as I said, a lot of times it breaks down in the third P in practice, right? Because practice then becomes, we've now developed our plan, we've done the preparation that we need to. And now we need to be able to practice. We need to practice for every customer interaction that we're going to be in. And we need to think about then getting really skilled at telling our sales story and to be able to tell the right sales story to drive the value based outcomes that we want to deliver to our customers. And so plan, prepare, practice and then play. Play is the piece of the puzzle where we actually go out onto the field with our customers and we begin to execute our sales motion. And the interesting thing about the first three Ps is that we control 100% of the first three. We control our planning 100%, our preparation 100% and our practice 100%. It's when we go on the field to play, we don't control things anymore. Because now there are many other factors involved.
[00:11:02] Now there are the things in dealing with the things that happen with our competitors, the things that go on inside of our customer accounts, whether it be the politics or a competitive sponsor that's inside of the account, those are the things that we don't control. And so what's really important to understand about Plan, Prepare, practice, play is that we've got to really spend a significant amount of our time in the first three P's. And the way that I think about it with my sales teams is we really look at Plan, Prepare, practice, play are really sales activities.
[00:11:35] And many times when I would go and join an organization or take the leadership position of a new team, what I would do is begin to look at my.
[00:11:44] I would really spend time with my team and I try to evaluate how much time was really being spent by that team in one of the four Ps, how much time in planning, how much time in preparation, how much time in practice, and then how much time in play. And what I was looking for is I want to see in my organization that 75 to 85% of my team's time is spent in one of the four Ps. And oftentimes when I would join a team or take a new role in a new organization, one of the things I would find is that very low percentage of the time of the sellers was actually spent in any of the four P's in one of the companies that I worked with, I found that no more than 30% of the sellers time of the salespeople's time was being spent in planning, preparation, practice or play. And so it's really important then as a sales leader or even as an individual contributor, you gotta evaluate how you're spending your time. And as Mike Weinberg teaches us, we gotta take control of our calendar. We, we have to be productively selfish in sales. We have to take control of our calendar, and we have to make sure that we carve out the time that we need for planning, for preparation, and for practice. And the reason that that's so important, again, is that the more time that we spend in those first three, the better we will perform when we move into play, into the piece that we don't control 100%. So we want to make sure that we really dedicate ourself to, to those first three in order to play the best possible game we can when we go on the field. One of the things I found, you know, again in this is that a lot of people talk about being strategic. They talk about having process.
[00:13:21] And what happens is that process.
[00:13:24] It is there. It's there until something goes wrong, until the end of a quarter or until the end of the year. And a lot of times what I would find is that sales leaders themselves would be the biggest reason why their teams would move out of a disciplined process of planning, preparation, practice, and then playing to just living in play, to living in transactional. Because at the end of the quarter, at the end of the year, when the pressure's up, that's when we would shift, really throw out the first three Ps and focus on living just in play. And what we've got to be able to do is we've got to be able to be very disciplined, even in those times, even under pressure, to stick to our process because we know our process yields the best results.
[00:14:08] And it's a very difficult thing when your team is living in play, when they're living in transactional incremental sales. This is that commodity trap I talked about in episode two. That commodity trap is the place where when process goes out the door and all we leave ourselves with is this commoditization where we owe. The only differentiator we have is price. That's what happens when we abandon our process and we live in play. And so what we've got to do as an organization is we've got to make that discipline shift back from living in transactional, living in play, living in small incremental deals to make a strategic shift back to planning, preparation and practice before we play. And that comes into play in what I said also in episode two about when you're doing this, you have to be able to eat short term to live long term. You got to know that that's what you're doing, you got to set as time in your calendar for planning, for preparation and practice. But you've got to be able to play the game that you're in right now and to be able to eat short term while you're making that transition back to living long, long term. When we do this, when we make that shift back, one of the things that is so key to understand is that that at first it's going to feel a little bit uncomfortable. It's going to feel like we're spending a lot of time in planning and preparation because right now we're used to living in play. And so we have to recognize that, that it's going to feel a little awkward at first, but we'll, if we do it and we do it with discipline, we'll develop that new sales muscle memory and it will begin to feel very natural for us to live in a very process driven environment.
[00:15:52] So we want to be able to do that and we want, when we do that and when we dedicate ourselves to that, what we find is that as we go through that process, we're going to find that we have more, better, bigger sales motions, strategic sales motions that are again predictable, repeatable, scalable and forecastable. What we want to be able to do in being process driven is that we really want to focus on planning. I'm going to focus right now just on planning and preparation. So in planning what we do is we're going to focus on building a really good ambition plan. And in our ambition again, we're defining the total potential that we're going to play for.
[00:16:29] And then as part of our planning, we're going to then build those detailed account or territory plans that we need in order to understand and be able to go drive that ambition, to pursue that ambitious outcome that we've set. We got to anchor our strategy in that go big ambition. And then we got to look at who are the executives we need to map to inside of the organization to be able to achieve those strategies.
[00:16:53] And then as we go through our planning, we're also developing not only the ambition and the strategic account plan, but we're going to build our execution plan.
[00:17:01] The thing that really focuses on everything that we do day to day, week to week in driving that strategic plan. And then when we think about preparation, right, preparation again is all the research that we do, everything that we need to know about our customer, about our territory, about everything that we gotta have in order to be successful. And so we do really good preparation. We identify the key Personas that we're going to be selling to. We think about the different ways that we're going to shape our sales messaging for those different Personas. We want to make sure that that we understand what our competitive environment is and that we study our competitors and we know what our differentiators are with those competitors. We want to build and sharpen our sales assets. The things that we're going to use in sales, again, back to the one that's the most important, that sales story. We got to have that sales story. We got to write that sales story down. And writing it down makes it real. And then we got to practice with it, right? We got to rehearse with it.
[00:17:56] But in our preparation, we want to align to our customers objectives. What are the things that our customers trying to accomplish? What are the things that they need to do for their business in order for them to grow and to be successful? And how can we align our solutions to helping them achieve what they're trying to accomplish? The first two P's are absolutely critical in what we do, planning and preparation. A heavy amount of time gets spent in planning and in preparation and we have to give it that time. We have to dedicate that time in our calendars. We have to be selfishly productive with our time and with our calendars in order to be able to do that.
[00:18:32] So I thank you very much. In our next episode in episode four, I'm going to talk about what we do in practice and how we play the game. Thank you very much for joining me for the Think Big Win Bigger podcast. I'm Dennis Sorensen. We'll see you next time.
[00:18:49] Thanks for listening to the Think Big Win Bigger podcast. Until next time, think bigger and just win.
