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There is a difference between goals and disciplines. As obvious as that statement may sound, many people—salespeople included—mistake these two ideas.

The reason some people don’t weigh what they want to weigh is because they have a goal of weighing a certain amount. But weighing a certain amount isn’t a goal; it is a discipline. To weigh whatever your target weight is on a daily basis requires that you eat a certain number of calories of certain foods, forego other foods, and exercise in an amount that causes you to remain at a constant weight.

Your weight is the result of the daily disciplines that you keep, for good or for ill. If your daily discipline is two scoops of ice cream before bed, then you will weigh exactly what your discipline dictates.

The same is true of your sales results.

Some salespeople believe they have a goal of making four sales calls per week. Making four new sales call per week, much like maintaining a certain weight, is made up of certain activities, including spending time prospecting each and every day, making cold calls, asking for referrals, attending networking events, and nurturing the relationship that you need in order to schedule these appointments.

Making four sales calls per week is a discipline. It is a constant, much like your weight. If your daily discipline is surfing the web, hanging at the water cooler, and avoiding your prospecting work, your sales results will be exactly what your daily disciplines dictate.

Disciplines are the things that you do every day, every month, every year, over and over again and without failure.

Goals Are Singular Events

Goals are single events. They are one-time occurrences. You may have a goal of billing $2,000,000 in 2010. At the end of the year, you will or will not have reached that goal. You may have goal of winning your $1,000,000 dream client, of increasing your wallet share by 25% across your top five key accounts, of opening a new market, or of launching a new product in the fourth quarter. These are all events. They are goals that can be measured and reached.

Disciplines Are More Powerful Than Goals

Disciplines are way more powerful than goals. Reaching your goals is the result of having maintained all of the daily disciplines that make up and lead to your goal. The reason so many goals are never achieved is not because the goal is unreachable, but because of a failure to maintain the daily disciplines that would have resulted in the goal being achieved.

A goal cannot easily be executed. But all of the activities that make up the goal can be.

Instead of making a goal to read one book per week, adopt the daily discipline of reading one hour a day and put it on your calendar. Executing this discipline leads to the achieving of the goal.

Instead of making a goal of making four new sales calls per week, adopt the daily discipline of making 2 hours of prospecting calls per day, attending one networking event per week, of asking every client for a single referral, and of executing the activities that you built into your nurture toolkit with devotion that borders on the religious.

Questions

1. What are your goals as a salesperson? Are they single, measurable events, or are they really disciplines that you wish to keep?




2. What are the daily disciplines that you are required to keep to reach your sales goals?




3. What goals do you believe that you have that are really disciplines that you wish to keep?




4. Make a list of your daily disciplines. Then, write down what will occur at some point in the future by keeping those daily disciplines. That is your goal. Then focus on keeping the your commitments to yourself and keeping your daily disciplines.

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4279.

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

Don’t Confuse Goals and Disciplines is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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As you travel through Tibet, you will encounter thousands of people selling things, including Buddhist prayer bowls, prayer wheels, and prayer beads, carpets, art work and, of course, jewelry. I fully expected to see this in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

What I did not expect was to encounter some of the greatest salespeople I have ever witnessed selling on the mountain passes between Lhasa, Tibet and Mt. Everest.

At the top of the mountain passes (some as high as 16,800 ft. in altitude), there are stunning and breathtaking views that demand you leave your car to stand in awe of nature’s beauty and to take pictures. The views are some of the most beautiful you will ever see, and they are emotionally very powerful.

What better place and what better conditions to set up shop to sell souvenirs and trinkets?

Do I Have Your Attention?

As you pull over to the side of the road and begin to take pictures, the saleswomen of the Tibetan mountain passes set upon you immediately. They know that the first thing they need from you is your attention, and being a tourist, they know how to get it. They start by shouting: “Hello!”

Having encountered your kind before and knowing your motivation, they follow up with: “Just looking.” Apparently everyone who has ever walked in front of them has said, “just looking,” and they are now repeating it.

Finally, they attack you with “Cheap, cheap,” and “very good,” and “yak bone,” even when none of these things are true. They follow their scripts, and they have your attention.

The Puppy Dog Close and the Negotiation

If they don’t have your attention, they will press on with harder tactics, like stepping in front of you and putting jewelry in your hands. And Heaven help you if you dare to pick up or accept the piece of jewelry or whatever is handed to you. The saleswomen of the Tibetan mountain passes will not easily accept the jewelry back—they know that if you were looking at it, you almost certainly like it, and they are going to sell it to you.

Once it is in your hands, it is almost certainly yours.

This sounds like a hard tactic, but it isn’t. Even though they are wearing masks to protect their skin from the damage of the elements, you can see that their eyes are smiling.

Then they start the negotiation. You say: “How much?” They reply: “Cheap. Cheap.” Then, they pull out a tiny pocket calculator and type in the amount in Chinese yuan. They start with a number like 110 yuan (about $16), anchoring the negotiation on their side—knowing full well that you are going to reject their first offer. You say: “Too much!” Then, in a brilliant negotiating tactic, they hand you the calculator and say: “How much?” The saleswomen of the Tibetan mountain passes allow you to anchor the negotiation on the other side, knowing with an almost absolute certainty that your offer is going to be more than they were ever hoping to get.

The negotiation continues when you type the number 50 into their calculator and hand it back, upon which you will be greeted with a bright smile that is visible even through their masks. Your saleswomen will type in a new number that appears to have met you somewhere in the middle, but closer to the number you have used as an anchor. Now, she looks like she is completely reasonable, and the reasonable thing for you to do is accept her counteroffer of, say, 65 yuan.

I watched this occur over and over again. Those who thought themselves tough negotiators were cutting the original price offered by 50%. But those who knew better were negotiating prices that were as much as 80% or 90% lower by simply saying no and walking away. Well . . . trying to walk away. When their price was accepted, they walked away with bags and bags of jewelry and artifacts, pleased with themselves for being such shrewd negotiators.

What Makes Great Salespeople

What makes the saleswomen of the Tibetan mountain passes so successful is that they keep asking for the sale over and over again. As you try to walk away, the salesperson (and her calculator) follows you, shouting: “Last price! Last price!” When you stop and turn around, she will enter in a new number on the calculator and hand it back to you for your last price (which I assure you is not your last price unless she agrees to it, otherwise, she will grab your arm and continue hammering prices into her calculator).

They are determined, relentless, and they persevere.

They are fearless and they ask for what they want.

They ask for the sale, and they keep asking until they get someone to buy.

They have to sell because they have people who are counting on them. And so they sell.

They also know the value of additional services. The picture you are looking at cost me 50 yuan.

Conclusion

Great salespeople exhibit great sales behaviors. This is true no mater where you go in the world, including the remote Tibetan mountain passes. What can you learn from the saleswomen of the Tibetan mountain passes?

Questions

1. The Tibetan saleswomen walk from their small villages every day, putting themselves in a position to sell their goods where their prospective clients will be. What are you doing to ensure that you are where your clients will be? Do you have a presence that ensures that you are there when opportunities arise?




2. What do you do to ensure that you have your dream client’s attention? How do you ensure you know and understand their motivations for buying? What language choices do you make based upon what you know about your dream clients and their likely needs and motivations that ensure you capture their attention in a meaningful way?




3. The Tibetan women follow you eyes and hand you the jewelry or whatever you were looking at; they are attuned to your buying signals. How do you assure that you are attuned to your dream client’s buying signals? What are the signals?




4. Negotiating does not easily frustrate the Tibetan women. They are playful and bring a good spirit to their negotiations—even though each sale may mean more to them than to someone somewhere else. What do you have to do to make your negotiations less adversarial and less zero sum? How can you learn to enjoy the game?




5. Who do you have to be to be as determined and relentless as you need to be to succeed?




6. Who do you have to be to be as fearless in asking for what you need to make the deal work for you and for your dream client?




7. Even though the saleswomen of the Tibetan mountain passes make transactional sales, there is much to be learned from them on asking for obtaining commitments. Who do you have to be to continually ask for the commitments you need to succeed?




8. Who is counting on you to behave like a salesperson?

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4279.

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

Can You Sell Better Than the Saleswomen of the Tibetan Mountain Passes? is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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I disappeared. I disappeared from the blog, I disappeared from work, and I disappeared from everything else for thirteen days. (Thanks to all of you who were kind enough to email me, call me, and direct message me to make sure nothing happened to me!)

A few months ago, I was offered a chance to visit Lhasa, Tibet and Shaghai, China with some friends. While planning our journey, one member of our group noted that, while we were so close to Mt. Everest, we should make the trip to Base Camp 1 at 17,000. We did the research, made the arrangements, and made the trip.

No doubt I will be using what I learned from this trip for some time to come. Some of the pictures I took tell an amazing story. But this metaphor is one of my favorites: the last few miles are often the hardest, but it is the only way to get the view, and the view is worth the effort.

To reach Everest, you have to travel across the Tibetan countryside for days. You literally have to cross over mountains with very little (or nothing) separating you from the edge on a road littered with obstacles like rockslides, livestock, and other drivers to whom lanes mean nothing. Crossing these mountains takes you to elevations almost as high as Basecamp, some as high as 16,600 ft. above sea level. A short walk from the car can leave you breathless, and you can expect to be awakened in the middle of the night gasping, for no other reason than the air is so thin.

Driving to Everest isn’t a trip you can or should make in a single day. To make the trip, you have to allow your body to acclimate to the high altitude. So your journey requires that you stay in the little towns between Lhasa and Mt. Everest for a few days, gradually climbing higher into the altitude. The best hotels you can you find will serve food that, should you be willing to eat it, will likely result in making your trip more difficult. The air quality is poor, and the countryside is dusty, and you’ll know this to be true even standing inside your hotel room.

The best accommodations won’t resemble anything that you are used to, even though the Tibetan people are sweet and generous, and even though they will offer you the best of everything that they have to offer.

But the last 60 miles is the toughest traveling. Once you leave Shegar, the last small town between you and Everest, you are off paved roads. You’ll travel up and over mountain passes that have never been paved, on roads that switch back dozens of times with nothing between you and the edge. The road is rough, and even the suspension on your four-wheel drive won’t do much to make traveling over the uneven earth easier. In many places, your guide will go completely off the road, knowing that it is both smoother and safer.

You make this trip not knowing what the view you will be like once you get there. If there is bad weather, you will see very little of Everest, even from Base Camp. If it is windy, the highest mountain on earth may be completely covered with clouds. Some stay for days and never see what they traveled so far to see. But if you make the journey, and if you have a little luck on your side, the journey ends with a breathtaking view that is provided to the few that are willing to make the journey.

What does any of this have to do with sales?

The Mountain Doesn’t Come to You: To Get the View, You Have to Make The Journey

The distance between you and your biggest dream client is great. The journey is not going to be easy, and the road that you have to travel over to win your dream client can sometimes be the most difficult and challenging road you will ever face. But to get there, you have to make the journey.

The mountain doesn’t come to you. It doesn’t come to anyone. Those that experience the mountain make the journey.

What Is Easier Down Low Is Harder at Altitude

Working on smaller, more transactional clients does nothing to prepare for you for what you face when pursuing giants. What may be very easy and very natural to you as you call on clients at one level may become incredibly difficult as you move higher (sleeping and breathing is easy at sea level, it is something altogether different at 15,000 ft.).

You may not rely on your sales process to win smaller clients. You may even win some deals after violating the iron laws of sales. But when you climb higher, you will find that what works at one level doesn’t work at all as you move higher. A half-assed needs analysis may get you by on transactional deals and may cost you your deal as you pursue your dream clients.

To survive and thrive and altitude, do what those who live at altitude do. They follow the rules, and they are happy to share them with you. They go a little slower. They do what they know to work most often. They put themselves in a place to succeed.

The Last Few Miles Are the Hardest. Make a Way.

The last few miles pursuing your dream client are often where the road gets both dangerous and bumpy. You run across challenges that you have never before encountered, and you often find yourself way off anything that resembles your road map.

If you have done everything right to get to the final stages, the last few miles can often be where deals are won and lost. Navigating the rough terrain, selling inside, going off the roadmap, and negotiating the terrain are all part of getting there. You may be physically tired, and you may be out of your element, but the end game is where you will be tested.

The challenges of winning increase as your deals get larger. Sometimes there is no road. Being a professional salesperson—and winning—means making a way where none exists.

Even If You Lose

Some people sleep in tents at Base Camp so that they have every possible chance to see Mt. Everest. Their determination and perseverance are sometimes rewarded. But the smart people make the journey knowing that even if they don’t get the outcome they were seeking, that the journey provides them with the growth, the experiences, and the stories.

It is best to journey to Everest when you have the greatest chance of a clear view. But sometimes, you have to go when you have the opportunity. The same is true of pursuing your dream clients: while it is nice to have favorable conditions, you have to make your attempt when you can—even if the conditions aren’t favorable.

And you have to love the journey—even when the road is rough and even when you don’t get what you came for.

Conclusion

Winning your big deal dream clients is a journey. The end game can often be the most difficult part of the journey. But if you would win, you have to make the journey.

Questions

1. What is your Mt. Everest? Who is your Mt. Everest? Have you started on your journey? Are you making the attempt that you need to make in order to win your dream client? Or, are you waiting for the mountain to come to you? When will you start your journey?




2. Do you recognize that what may work at one level may become a liability at a higher level? Do you recognize that those who perform at a higher level have rule-sets that they follow that allow them to succeed at that level? Are you studying those rule-sets? What discernments are you making about what you do and what those who live and breathe at a higher level are doing? Who are you studying?




3. Are you willing to go off the roadmap and make way to get there with your dream client? Are you comfortable being uncomfortable? What are you willing to do to move obstacles, to navigate over and around them when necessary? What are you doing now to make a way? What should you be doing?




4. What do you have to do to love the journey? What are you gaining from your experiences? What lessons are you learning and how are you applying these lessons to your future deals? How are you applying what you learn to your life? How do you get the most from losing?

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4279.

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

The Last Few Miles Are the Most Difficult, but the View is Worth It is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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