Skills and Mastery

I always remember my first Sales Manager, saying ‘Your habits will make or break you in Sales’. He was nearly right. Your habits will make or break you in any venture. Habits are so important, I believe they are key for success because they how you form skills and mastery. Success in any venture depends on your skills and mastery in your particular field of endeavour. How do you increase your skills and become a master? Practise, experience and performing certain key actions over and over. In other words your habits are the key.

Break it down

Think about whenever you learned any new skill, under a coach or tutor. Think about learning a new musical instrument. There are always drills and actions you repeat over and over, for example learning the scales. They seem almost mundane and insignificant and yet these are the foundations of your skill. So the first thing you should do when learning or improving any skill is form a habit of practise. Never ever miss a practice.
Early in my career, I was determined to improve my selling skills. I first started by breaking this skill into many smaller skills such as: Cold call telephone prospecting, Questioning, listening, presenting and closing. Then I chose one of these areas to improve first.

What Skill First?

What area or skill should you learn first? Well that depends on you. It could be an area where you need the most improvement. Another school of thought would suggest to work on improving areas where you are already adept ie concentrate on your strengths. A third way is to choose an area that would have the most impact on your results.

My Cold Calling Skills

I remember when I first started cold telephone call sales. I hated it, but I knew that the better I got at it, the better my sales results would be. The more people I could get appointments with, the more I would sell. I dreaded interrupting people, though. I worried about what they would say. I worried about what I would say if they asked me a question. Would I cope if they were nasty to me?
However I was determined that I would become proficient at this key selling skill. First I set myself a daily target, to call at least 20 prospects. This was my habit that I was not going to miss.

Scripting

Next I wrote a short script. Then I started dialing. I did dread it at first. I just wanted to get my 20 calls over and done with and get on with the rest of my day. So I would do the calls first thing in the day. After a few months my results improved, I could predict that out of 100 calls I would book one appointment (1.0% conversion rate). My results kept on improving until I actually started to enjoy it. My conversion rate doubled to 2.0%, so I was getting about two appointments booked per week, out of 100 calls.

My skills improved the more I repeated the activity. What did I actually improve? Well I first noticed what times of day I was most likely to get to make contact with the prospect. I noticed the nuance. I would get better results if I spoke my script a certain why, I experimented with the words and tonality. So the more I did it the better I got.

Another key part of this example is that I became unattached to the results of each individual sales call. This took the fear away. If they hung up the phone or were rude, so what? Actually not many were. Most people are polite if you are polite with them.

PIG review

In practising a skill to master, continuous improvement is what you are after. This is where small incremental improvements are compounded over time. A useful tool you can use to help you in this is the Personal Improvement Grid or the delightfully titled PIG review. After every performance you can review your results and ask yourself the 4 questions, which are designed to root out any areas for improvement or where you can improve further.

What did I do well – and why?

What went wrong – and why?

What could I do differently – and how?

What could I do that is new – and when?