Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Really what I would do as a seller when I would drive around, I probably looked like a madman driving around Southern California as a seller, talking to myself in my car as I'm on my way to a sales call. Because what I'm doing in that moment is I'm rehearsing what it is that I want to do inside of that sales call, and then I'm thinking about all the things that might happen in that sales call that I need to be prepared for.
[00:00:23] 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.
[00:00:46] Today I want to talk to you again. I want to finish where we we left off on on podcast episode three and last episode we talked about planning and preparation. And today I'm going to focus heavily around practice and play and what we do in practice and what we do in play. And so when we think about practice as a seller, we want to think about it in the same way that an athlete or a professional athlete thinks about what they have to do to practice. It begins with thinking about what we did in our planning and our preparation. If you think about practice with your plan, part of practicing with your plan is really going over and rehearsing your plan in your own mind and going over your plan with your team and everybody that's going to be involved in helping you be successful.
[00:01:31] So practice really involves really studying and knowing your plan and being able to communicate that plan, communicate it to yourself, communicate that plan to your account team. If you work with an account team and be able to communicate your plan to your sales leader and to be able to communicate that plan to anyone inside of your organization that wants to talk to you about what it is that you're going to do in your account or in your sales territory this year. And so having that plan, having the plan for accounts and having the plan for territory is really key. But then practicing with it and being able to know it inside and out. And also the other key aspect of practicing with it is that as you go through your sales motion, as you play the game, as you execute in your ghost plan, what you're going to find is that a lot of times there are a lot of things that we don't anticipate when we're doing our Planning. But by knowing our plan and knowing it really well, and practicing with our plan as we go through that motion, we are better equipped to be able to adjust our plan, to be able to think about how our plan needs to be modified. And when we get to. When we spend some time talking about ghost, what we'll talk about is really where the greatest change occurs. But I'll just tell you, the greatest change occurs in the strategies and the tactics. The tactics greater than strategies, and then strategies greater than any of the objectives or goals that we set. But the greatest change occurs in tactics and strategies. The better that we practice with our plan and that we know our plan, the better equipped we're going to be to be able to adapt to new tactics and new strategies that we need to bring to bear. Another key element of practice is really practicing for every customer interaction. Really, what I would do as a seller when I would drive around, I probably look like a madman driving around Southern California as a seller, talking to myself in my car as I'm on my way to a sales call. Because what I'm doing in that moment is I'm rehearsing what it is that I want to do inside of that sales call, and then I'm thinking about all the things that might happen in that sales call that I need to be prepared for. And so I'm practicing that interaction, and I'm going through every interaction I'm gonna have with the customer. I'm practicing before I pick up the phone to call the customer. I'm practicing before I go in front of the customer. I'm even practicing when I'm creating written communications for my customer. Because I spend a great deal of time thinking through exactly what it is that I need to accomplish with that communication and be able to see if what I'm communicating in that email or in that text is delivering the message that I want. So I consider that all practice in what we're doing, in the work that we're doing with our customers, and how we're preparing ourselves for every interaction. And so another key element of practice that we go through is really practicing with our sales story and making sure that we know our sales story backwards and forwards, frontwards and backwards, that we really understand our sales story so that we can use our sales story in a very fluid way, that we can begin to think about our sales story in a very broad way. Because once we know our sales story so well and inside and out, we can begin to make adjustments to our sales story depending on the Persona that we're talking to the situation that we're in, the competitive factors that we run into. And so by really understanding that sales story and being able to be very versant in that story and very flexible and versatile in that story, that's really the key in the practice, right? And one of the things that I work on with a lot of my clients is really developing that first outreach messaging that we're going to use to reach out to either a new client or a new executive inside of our client. And we want to make sure that that messaging is exactly right. A key part of that, again, is this practice that we have with our messaging so that as we find ourselves not only once we move beyond the written communication or the, the email communication to the customer, that when we're with the customer in person and we're. And we're communicating with them in person, that we have that vers in the way that we can navigate it. And so it's really important that we do that in practice. And probably what I think might be the most important part of that practice is what I call attacking my own position, right? I want to be able to attack my own position. I want to look for every possible weakness in my story or in my presentation or in my proposal that I'm going to deliver to that customer. I want to be looking for every possible weakness, and I want to be focused on how am I going to deal with whatever attack might come against my proposal, my presentation, or my outreach. And so I want to be prepared and try to put myself, as I said, if I'm driving around, I'm practicing for every possibility that could come. So I'm looking for every possible weakness in what I'm going to present to that customer. And then I'm trying to think through how I'm going to navigate if those attacks come. When we think about moving to play, it's really important that in play we understand and know our plan and that we have the discipline to stick to our plan, and we have the discipline to stick to our process.
[00:06:49] I'm not saying that we can't have flexibility, but we built that plan and we have faith in that plan. And we've got to know our plan, and we've got to be able to use that plan to our advantage in play. And that's a key part of that, right? We've got to be able to, in play, focus on the critical things that must get done, must get done today, must get done this week. And so when we're, when we're executing our Sales motions. We got to know what that next right shot is that we've got to take. If we know what the shot is and we know that that shot's got to be taken today or it's got to be taken this week, we can make sure that we do that. And that's a critical part of what we do in play, and that's part of how we make sure that we do this really effectively through what we do in execution planning, through our ghost planning, that we'll talk about more depth in future episodes. Once we know what's the shot in front of us, that's the shot we want to focus on. That's the shot we want to take. Because if we're thinking about ourselves and we're thinking about situations that we might find ourselves in, and we're thinking about things that aren't relevant to what has to happen today, but we're thinking about what might happen next month or in three months with regard to this sales motion, we're not focused on the shot that we've got to get done right now. And so we got to focus on that next shot, and we got to play that shot that's right in front of us. As we go through this, we want to be disciplined, as I said, but we also want to be adaptable. We want to be disciplined to our process, disciplined to our plan, but be adaptable. We want to practice with this presentation that we're going to make to that customer. But then we've got to be adaptable. We've got to be able to read the room. We got to be able to see what's happening with our clients, and we got to be able to be adaptable and flexible, but with the big picture in mind of the plan that we've laid out, we want to be able to do that. As I mentioned in the previous episode, the other key thing we want to be able to do in play is we want to be able to stay in offense, right? We always want to be on offense, and we want to have this attitude that anytime a situation, even in a customer sales call, when we find ourselves playing defense, we want to make sure that we maintain at least two thirds of our focus and our effort on staying on offense. We want to be focused on moving the ball where we've got to move the ball on the field.
[00:09:02] And we want to be able to make sure that we understand what, again, from our plan, what it takes to be able to stay on offense. And while we recognize what's happening, the things that are Coming up that cause us to play a little defense. We've got to find ways to navigate and still stay on offense inside of our, whether it be in the sales call, in a presentation, or in our entire sales campaign or sales motion in a particular account. So we want to stay on offense. And so having a discipline and knowing that that 2/3 on offense, one third on defense at most, that's where we want to play the game. The other key thing is something that I borrowed and I learned or read from the US Air Force, right? And it's something called an OODA loop. OODA is ooda. So observe, orient, decide, act, and then we come back and we observe again, we orient again, we decide again, and we act again. And we want to think about this OODA loop in the way that we conduct our sales calls. When we're on the field playing with the customer, we want to be observing what's happening, we want to orient ourselves to what's happening and to again to our plan. And then we want to take the decision that we need to take. And then we want to act and then we want to observe again based on our action that we took. What's happening now, what's the next set of observations, orientations, decisions and action that we need to take. And so that OODA loop is a big part of what I focus on again when we're in play. And the other key thing I think, and probably foremost in all of the things in play is that you got to trust your preparation. You got to trust in your preparation and you got to execute your plan and you got to enjoy it. You got to enjoy it and you got to play the game because you've done everything you can do. You spent the time that you need to spend. You know, we want to spend 75 to 85% of our time in the 4Ps. But then within the 4Ps, we got to know that 80% of our time needs to be in that planning, preparation and practice. And we got to trust in that. We gotta trust in that, that we can play the best possible game we can when we're on the field. And so trusting in our plan and sticking to that plan and having fun with it, that's why we're here, right? We're in sales because we love sales, and we're in sales because we like the energy of it. And so we can have fun with it. And it's a lot more fun in sales when we're acting with purpose, when we're acting from a plan, when we're acting through our process driven approach.
[00:11:27] And so again, what we want to be able to do is in process driven sales, we want to build and refine a process that we can trust. When we're under pressure, we want to remember to plan, to prepare, to practice and to play. In doing this, what we're also doing is we're training our subconscious mind to help us. We want to train our conscious and our subconscious minds to work in our favor in sales. And that's what planning, preparation and practice do. They help us do that. They feed the subconscious. Writing things down makes them real. Writing our sales story down makes it real. Writing our plan down makes it real. Writing our plan down for a sales call makes it real. When play flows from planning, preparation and practice, it becomes stronger, it becomes more natural, it becomes easier, and it's more fun. I want to thank you for joining me today for this episode. Today, again, we hit on practice and we hit on play the four P's. Thank you very much for joining me for this episode. And I'll be back again with episode number five. Thank you very much.
[00:12:34] Thanks for listening to the Think Big, Win Bigger podcast. Until next time, think bigger and just win.
