Tag Archives: activities

Friday Strategy: Make it a 10-Point Day

It’s the end of the week.  Depending on how yours went, you either have 20 pounds of sand and a 10 pound bag and you’re wondering how your going to get it done, or maybe you are at the end of a long week and wondering if you have the steam to keep going and finish strong. 

Either way, here’s an idea:  Make it a 10-point day.

Give yourself a weighted value for key activities accomplished.  Specifics may vary here, just make it a stretch.  For example: 5 points for a contract, 3 points for an executive meeting, 2 points for an executive phone conversation, 1 point for any buyer touch-point like a nice email/voicemail combo.  Now, try to  reach or beat a total of 10 points today.

Hope you need a calculator!

Yeah, It’s a Number Game Too…

Like success in any professional career, there are many ingredients to success in selling.  Accurate opportunity targeting – as my friends at Selling To Zebras will tell you, is a critical one.  Chase the right prey and your hunt will be more successful.  

Another key element is using a solid framework (pick a methodology that fits your situation) for high-gain conversations with prospects to elicit their needs and to link your solutions in meaningful ways.  

Also important are elements like pre-call planning, lead-nurturing, compelling proposal creation, Ferocious Follow-up - the list is too long to discuss in one post.

One inescapable success factor is activity.  A wise sales mentor once told me that activity yields opportunity which yields results.  Sometimes hearing that sales is a “numbers game” is a turn off.  It makes the sales process seem cheesy or pushy in some way.  But the fact that you need to produce quantity as well as target quality is not a contradiction.  It takes both. You can have the best targets in the world, but unless you are acting on them daily, all you have is a glorified list.  Go ahead – put up some numbers today!

Sales Procrastination

Interesting thoughts from Seth Godin on how busy does NOT equal important in life: http://bit.ly/a1BuOY .  Applied to sales and marketing, this even more poignant.  Doing lots of (the wrong) activities will not build your funnel.  What are you “busy” with today?

Your Personal Brand – Thoughts from HBR

Excellent thoughts on personal brand from Ron Ashkenas writing for HBR.  This is something I’ve thought a lot about lately, especially when launching this blog.  Still a work in process.  When’s the last time you put some thought to this?  http://bit.ly/8Ia5xP