The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

I have a confession to make… I absolutely hated cold calling. It’s been a few years since I was in outside sales, but I still have flashbacks to some of my worst cold calling experiences. You know the ones where you’re treated like a complete nuisance, talked down to, or hung up on. 

Necessary Evil

Like most salespeople, cold calling for me was a necessary evil. It was evil because of those nightmare experiences, though pretty rare, but it was necessary because sometimes cold calling actually worked – especially if you did it often enough. Some of my best clients started with a cold call, or 10. While it was a numbers game, I found that the better I got at identifying the potential of a prospect and utilizing valid business reasons, the more success I would have. 

However, despite the “wins” that occurred on occasion – I spent a lot of my precious time cold calling, and if you’re in media sales or many other B2B sales industries then you probably do too. The downside to that was the fact that I wasn’t great at cold calling, I was great at selling. I was great at identifying needs, creating customized solutions, developing integrated marketing campaigns, and building relationships – yet I had to spend at least a quarter of my time doing the former. 

If you put a bad apple in a bushel of good apples, the bad apple won’t become good. In fact, when a bad apple starts to rot, it emits a gas that can indeed start to rot the good apples. But even if the bad doesn't completely rot the good apples, it's important to lock on to the fact that the bad won't get better by being with the good.

Pilots learn that the best way to land a plane is to look long toward the horizon, not directly beneath them. Great sales leaders do the same thing. They focus on the horizon, not just what's right in front of them.

Pilots learn that when landing, you are better off looking down the runway at the horizon than the ground rushing up underneath you. You need to balance keeping your eyes focused on the horizon, while peripherally watching your height above the runway to achieve a smooth landing. We have all felt the runway slam when a pilot gets this wrong.

An Accenture study, written about in Forbes, found that 43% of employees who are about to quit their jobs cite lack of recognition from supervisors as the reason they would leave. Every time I read that stat I feel convicted that I don’t always show as much appreciation as I should. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the individuals on my team, it’s just that I have so many things fighting for my attention. It’s easy to miss this key leadership responsibility. Many times managers don’t think about showing appreciation until it’s too late—until someone on their team leaves for another opportunity.  

Last week was an exceptionally brutal soccer game for my girls. They played a team that preferred to play with aggression verses skill. There were many times the referee should have intervened with his whistle but chose not to. The opposing team got away with foul after foul, so guess what happened? 

The opposing team became more aggressive as the game went on, and by the end of the game, we had two girls with slashes on their arms that resembled a small animal attack and another girl with a snapped collar bone. All predictable outcomes based on the opposing team’s behaviors. With many sports, as you watch behaviors, you can start to anticipate the expected outcome, and this is also how it plays out in sales. 

I recently had a coaching assignment with a highly ambitious salesperson. This person wasn’t prospecting for new business as often or as much as her manager would like. I’d had a few calls with her and given her a few assignments to complete between our calls in the prospecting part of the sales process. Her performance for me (and for her manager) continued to be lackluster. I've done a lot of individualized coaching over the years. Because of the talent interviews my company does, I am privy to the innate talents of everyone I coach. Often times my coaching assignments are to get people to do something they are not currently doing. Prospecting is often at the top of the list. 

The results from the most recent State of Sales Survey conducted by Salesforce reveals some interesting insight into what the best salespeople do to close more deals and make lots of money. 280 salespeople as well as clients were surveyed.