In running we have a saying:
Hills pay the bills.
Train in the hills
because then the flats feel easy.
If you always do flats,
hills will feel hard.
It’s a simple message:
train hard, race easy.
You know what I’m gonna say.
It’s the same in sales.
We’re so busy optimizing for making sales easy
we’re forgetting the hills.
I’m all for AI.
I use it all the time.
It’s amazing
but don’t let it take away your own muscle memory,
your own sales skills,
because then let’s look at what happens.
If we’re all optimizing for the same model, we’ll all be the same.
Every piece of outreach,
every pitch deck,
every pitch
will start to look and feel the same.
It’ll be average
and when you optimize for average, what happens?
You become average.
Hands up who wants to be average?
Not me.
Hills pay the bills.
Sales catches whales.
A whale is a big spender
but how do you catch a big client?
I think it’s by training at the hard stuff: the soft skills.
Really listening to people. We’re so wired to talk we forget to listen.
To accept it’s not about you. We are so focused on us, we forget about them.
To get told no a hundred times and still smile
To stop thinking they’re ghosting us and examine what we haven’t solved.
The hard skills of sales are taking it on the chin.
Understanding is that it’s our lack of actions:
not enough outreach,
not enough empathy,
not enough listening.
Soft is hard.
As Jobs once said;
“Simple is hard.”
Of course, use AI.
but don’t forget to train that sales muscle.
pick up the phone and make a cold call
write lots of sales emails
double the number of meetings and watch the entire meeting back if you did it on Zoom
The great Kobe Bryant watched every game he played in full on rerun on video.
That’s hard.
Do that.
Watch every pitch you do and watch it all back
because if you want to catch whales,
if you want to pay the bills,
get in the hills.
Ned
Content of the week
It is happening on Thursday, 16th of July at 5 p.m. Singapore time.
In 30 minutes I’ll tell you the 30 most important things I’ve learned in the last 30 years of sales, and you can implement them in the next 30 days.
How many more times can I say 30 to make you want to sign up here?
It’ll be awesome
