ELMEC revisited…E of the P and I…

ELMEC revisited…a sales refresher

In sports it’s called muscle memory. You know that amazing ability to return to a skill we were once proficient at? Take golf. Stop chasing that little ball for ten years and you can still pick up a club and that familiar hand grip and swing feels almost automatic.

The problem is that despite that familiar feeling you might whiff the ball altogether, or at best shank it about 45 degrees off its’ intended flight. Same for that BMX bike you could ride on the back tire so many years ago and impress your buddies. Of course, you can still ride a bike, but that BMX championship form is long gone.

Mental muscle memory is similar, and even if we’re practicing a skillset daily, it tends to drift or morph over time. Take the sales process. We can easily recite the mantra of Earn, Learn, Match, Explain and Close. But maybe we’ve drifted away from faithfully following those five essential sales steps. It’s akin to gradually forgetting to keep our head down during that golf swing.

So, like that PGA pro who still takes lessons to stay sharp and refine his skills, we likewise need to practice remedial “coaching” to both ward off the decay in our sales execution or eliminate that bad habit of letting our left elbow bend on our “sales backswing”.

Next up: Earning that favorable attention.

E of the P and I

Here’s a sad truth: Evaluating our plans and the quality of their implementation is pretty much never done. We understand that it’s just common sense if we expect to avoid what wasn’t effective (and more importantly) to know what to repeat when it was. But all too often we don’t.

The best time to do it is while its’ memory is fresh – like immediately following that sales presentation or tough interaction with a team member. Before you start the car to leave, or go on the next task, memorialize it. And the easiest way is do that is by recording your thoughts on that smartphone and listening to them later when there’s time to seriously consider them.

When you do that – and it was a fail, ask yourself why. For example. did you really gain any degree of favorable attention? If that was the case, work on improving that skill. If a novel objection stopped you in your tracks, think about you might have overcome it or maybe how to build a preventive defense into your presentation. And if you hit it out of the park, try to find the thing that maybe gave you that win. No matter the outcome, knowing what you can either avoid or incorporate in a future call is worth the time