Learning and Earning, Faster and Better | Part 2

Hello Sales Reset Community

Wouldn’t it be great if you were confident your selling skills would improve constantly?

How would it feel if you knew with certainty that your ability to find and win new business was continually improving?

In last week's newsletter, we reviewed how to establish and use your Learning and Earning Plan. This week, we’ll examine how to turn your plan into actual results in the real world.

This week is all about PRACTICE!

Ask anyone in professional sports, and they’ll say PRACTICE is the key to improving and sustaining PERFORMANCE levels.

It’s the same for any practical skill. If you want to improve your guitar playing, photography skills, or writing ability, the key is practice, practice, practice.

But in the world of professional selling, hardly anybody talks about the need to practice or how to practice. Let’s put that right!

I’ve been training salespeople for 40 years. With all this experience, I can confidently say there’s one hugely valuable and vastly underrated way of practising how to sell.

The best way to practice selling is through role-play. 😳

I know many salespeople have issues with role-play for all sorts of reasons.

I want to convince you to embrace role-play and learn to have fun using this powerful way to practice and improve your selling. 😃

How you'll improve sales results this week

• Performance or practice?

• Practice to Improve Performance: A Quick Guide

• Best Practices: Practice does NOT make perfect!

• It’s time to embrace and enjoy role-play!

• Why do so many people hate role-play?

• Who can I practice with?

• Potential challenges of practising selling skills

• How to practice your practising this week 😀

• End of Week - Reflective Practice

Performance or practice?

Most salespeople don’t practice. Few salespeople set aside sufficient time to diligently apply themselves to learning and practising new and better ways of selling.

Compared to sports and music professionals, most salespeople want to achieve maximum PERFORMANCE without investing in the PRACTICE time that will improve their skills and preparation.

In contrast, we can confidently say that every successful professional sports and music performer practices rigorously—probably every day and for hours at a time.

By now, you’re probably asking: Yes, but HOW can salespeople practice?

I’m glad you asked!

Practice to Improve Performance: A Quick Guide

Practice is the consistent and focused effort to enhance skills and abilities in a particular area. This can be sports, music, or how to sell more effectively.

The key to effective practice lies in its structure and intention. Here are some tips to make your practice sessions more productive:

• Set Clear Goals: Define your goal in each practice session. This keeps you focused and motivated.

• Stay Consistent: Regular practice, even in small doses, is more effective than sporadic, intense sessions.

• Seek Feedback: Constructive criticism helps you identify areas for improvement and refine your techniques.

• Out of Your Comfort Zone: Push your boundaries with tasks beyond your current abilities. This is where growth happens.

• Reflect and Adjust: After each practice session, assess what worked and what didn’t. Adapt your approach accordingly.

Best Practices: Practice does NOT make perfect!

You might have heard that practice makes perfect. That’s not right.

Practice makes permanent.

Practice the wrong things, and you’ll make them permanent. Then, before learning the correct way to do things, you must UNLEARN what you’ve practised. Unlearning can often be much more challenging than learning!

Make sure you’re practising the right things.

We recommend you practice to improve your skills with the best practices of our Sales Reset Mastery Self-Assessment.

We recommend you DON’T practice conventional and adversarial sales techniques, such as “overcoming objections!”

It’s time to embrace and enjoy role-play!

Role-play is the most powerful way to practice and improve your selling.

It’s all very well talking about the best practices and skills we need, but can we do what we’re talking about? Role-play is where we find out!

Embracing role-play as a critical element of your working week can enhance selling skills and results for lots of reasons:

• Safe Practice Environment: Role-play provides a risk-free place to practice and refine our skills without fear of losing actual sales.

• Improved Adaptability: Sales role-play helps us prepare for various scenarios in real sales situations.

• Enhanced Communication Skills: Engaging in role-play exercises helps us improve our communication skills, including listening, empathy, and asking great questions.

• Confidence Building: Regular practice through role play boosts confidence as we become more familiar with handling different sales situations.

• Feedback and Continuous Improvement: Role-play sessions should always include input from other people, which is invaluable for identifying areas of improvement.

• Empathy and Customer Understanding: By simulating customer interactions, we can better understand our customer's perspectives, priorities and needs.

• Better Preparation: Role-play for important meetings will almost always uncover topics that need better preparation. You’ll identify the key moments likely to occur, and you can look at different ways of handling these key moments to see what’s expected to work best.

Why do so many people hate role-play?

Sadly, too many people have had bad role-playing experiences, or they’ve heard stories of bad experiences.

Role-playing in front of a group of your peers can be stressful. Role-play is almost always best done in small groups of just two or three people.

Unfortunately, too many sales trainers and managers enjoy embarrassing delegates and team members. This is just plain wrong and unacceptable behaviour.

Ultimately, role-play is challenging. In role-play, it often turns out that what we thought we understood, we can’t yet do!

But we can learn to love role-play and embrace this powerful way to practice and improve our selling.

Who can I practice with?

Practising how to sell by yourself can be difficult.

I hope you have a sales team leader who can give you enough time to practice and use role-play. Perhaps you can get together with colleagues in your team to prepare for a big meeting or to develop a particular aspect of your skills?

Even if you’re working in a great sales team with an effective sales team leader who embraces the need for continual practice, it can be valuable to be part of a wider community of practice.

This is why we’ve recently established our Sales Reset Together Community of Practice.

We’re about to start our LIVE! practice sessions. In these regular workshops, we’ll role-play selling each other's products and services in short, highly structured role-plays in very small groups.

We aim to have lots of fun, share experiences and practice our selling skills to improve our sales performance!

Potential challenges of practising selling skills

Finding the time to practice: Finding the time to practice can be challenging. However, once you’ve experienced the effectiveness of your new skills, it becomes easier to find the time. It’s MUCH easier to cut down a tree with a SHARP axe!

Knowing what to practice: It’s best to practice where you’ll get the fastest improvement. How will you know what to practice? Plan to complete your Sales Reset Mastery Self-Assessment every three months.

Measuring improvement: How will you know if you’re improving? Well, hopefully, you’ll see the impact on your sales results. But the better answer to this question is, you guessed it, do your self-assessment regularly to see the evidence of your improving skills.

How to practice your practising this week 😀

Every week in this newsletter, I recommend what to practice.

If you’ve read this far in this week’s edition, you can see why I emphasize the need for practice!

My single recommendation this week is:

End of Week - Reflective Practice

Reflective practice is a crucial component of continuous professional development. That’s why we end every newsletter with prompts for your reflective practice on the theme of each week’s newsletter.

You can copy and paste these prompts into a recurring weekly activity scheduled for the close of business on a Friday.

At the end of this week, ask yourself these key questions:

We hope you’ve found this Weekly Sales Reset valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

Here’s a link to a page explaining how these weekly newsletters are designed to help you learn and practice your customer success selling skills.

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Community of Practice

Ask Questions, Share Your Experience

If you have any questions or experience to share:

• LinkedIn Group - Join our World-Class Customer Success Selling Group on LinkedIn to ask questions or comment.

• Sales Reset Together Community - Click here to learn more about our private community of members committed to achieving and maintaining their Sales Reset.

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