At Least Have Great Goal Images When Setting Your Sales Goals!

At least… set one! 

TonyK and CherieV with the smart persistent sales, show, sales tips and to take action, stay persistent and set one. If you want to learn more, to sell more! 

Mon, Oct 03, 2022  

00:29

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00:32

Now. Let’s at least set one with goal images!

00:36

Hey, welcome. Welcome again to our show. So today’s show we are going to go over the framework of the SPS’s: smart, persistent sales. At least Tony has a lot of information to share with us on this. So I’m gonna hand it over to him.

00:51

Thank you, Cherie. Yes, smart, persistent sales. That is our coaching program, SPS smart persistence sales. In today’s show as she mentioned, we’re going to go over some parts of SPS from a high level. CherieV has some stats for us first.

01:06

Yes, I love my stats at least. So we have a good one from CrunchBase. And it says that top sellers spend an average of six hours every week researching their prospects. Why is this important? Ah Yes…

01:20

You want to do the proper amount of planning with goal images, the first part of our framework is planning, right planning, taking action and staying persistent. Those are the three parts of SPs planning, taking action and staying persistent. So we’ll go over from a high level, as I mentioned, but yes, six hours every week researching is correct.

There’s nothing wrong with that at least, plenty of time, what I would like to do is not do that during calling hours, I would do that in the morning. Or I would do that in the afternoon, excuse me, after work in the evening, when the calling hours have shut down or on the weekend.

So most times, I got all my research done over the weekend. And I would take all the day, when I was just cold calling a cold caller in the beginning of my career, just calling all day, I would have all the research done, I wouldn’t waste any daylight.

I wouldn’t waste time that I could reach somebody researching about them. But you definitely want to research your clients. For sure. We’ll talk about that a little more.

But there’s a great story I wanted to get into. When I was young, it’s when my sales career started it this is kind of not kind of this is where the whole SPS smart, persistent sales started, you’re not always going to have the perfect plan, you’re not always going to have the perfect action steps. And you’re not always going to be able to stay persistent as much as you want. Right?

The Persistence piece is measuring, tracking, measuring, making adjustments and taking action at least again, you’re never going to have the perfect tool, the perfect time. And that’s what this story speaks to. I was 13 years old, living in East Plano Avenue K and Parker road. Some of you know the area there was an old sack and save there. And we live right behind there on Glenwood, Glenwood drive.

And I was 13 years old and school was ramping up time for school fall was right around the corner. Summer was ending. And I wanted some guest jeans with the green triangle on the pocket though. I saw him in the magazine and I said all the cool if I could have those for school, and you know, we didn’t have a lot of money growing up and we’re middle lower middle class, but we didn’t have $100 for jeans. Let’s just put it that way.

I asked my mom, she said Go ask your father. I went to my dad, he was out in the garage and I said dad ordered some jeans. He said yeah. I said they’re $100. He said, Well, what about Levi’s? I said when I want guest jeans and I think Levi’s at the time were 2025 bucks. So the jeans I’m asking for are four times more expensive.

My dad’s like your budget for all your clothes is like 150 So you’re gonna blow $100 of your budget on one item. I said, you know me being 13 I was like Sure. He said No, I’ll tell you what I do. He pointed to a he had just bought a craftsman push mower lawnmower from Sears he had two five gallon jugs of gas full he said I’ll get let you use the mower all day and there’s two there’s 10 gallons of gas.

Without even thinking I just grabbed it and grabbed the mower the gas cans. Put the gas cans on top of the mower started pushing it down the street and knocking on doors and no CRM no list no car no script just wanted some guest jeans and it was enough for me to take action.

So that’s a big part of it your why is really important why you’re doing it some people the paychecks enough some people to take care of their families very important. So there’s a big piece of it. That’s, you know, the motivation, right. When I would interview salespeople to hire I would look at the motivation I’d asked you know, you know, what’s the motivation for this job and some people it’s their career, they’re driven to be successful. Other people, it’s financial and motivations, motivation, whatever works for you. At that time, my motivation was a pair of guest jeans. So we’re walking down the street.

Now, I knocked on my first door door, and I didn’t have a script. So I just told the truth. I said, my name is Tony, I live on your street. I’m trying to earn some money for some school clothes. Can I cut your lawn for $20. And, you know, I had, I eventually got 15 yards, I got about 30 no’s, and made about $300. So I had enough to buy three pairs of jeans.

I was 13 years old. And that’s when my sales career started door to door pushing a lawn more. So I started on the grassroots. And I even used to do that when I would interview salespeople and take them to the next stage and say, Look, we’re gonna go knock on some doors.

And it was even like, when I had a auto restoration shop, the Mustang shop, and I was hiring people for to to sell for me on the phone to set appointments to reach out, and I would take them door knocking and we weren’t selling, you know, these 100,000 150,000 $200,000 Auto restaurant restoring classic Mustangs.

Classic Shelby’s door to door is really not the method, you bring your, your your service to the market, but I wanted to see if they had the heart to knock on a door and talk to someone and be spontaneous enough face to face. And that’s if you can do that if you can knock on doors and have people purchase your product or service cold calling is the same thing. They don’t know you. You don’t know a lot about them.

You’ve planned a little bit. But really, it’s just taking action and adjusting.

So as I walked down the street, I found some things I was saying were resonating better than other things I was saying.

So I was being persistent and making adjustments. I didn’t just keep saying the same thing.

As I was talking to people, I was watching their body language. I was looking in their eyes. If I was getting, if I saw that it was already sold.

I stopped talking Yes, believe it or not, I stopped talking. So there was things I was doing.

When I look back, I was actually making adjustments. I didn’t know what I was doing.

But I was like, Okay, that didn’t work. Let me try something else. So that’s really that story I tell is where SPS started smart, persistent sales. And it’s a it’s a book that’s coming. It’s a sales coaching program that’s coming.

We’re developing it, we got a lot of great things coming. Wouldn’t you would introduce a Cherie.

07:22

Oh, yes, that’s a great story. Tony, thank you so much. Fascinating. lawnmower, desire for a pair of jeans with the green triangle and some cutting of lawns. So talking about cutting of lawns?

Well, there’s one of my favorite quotes by Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln. He says, Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe. And this is a really profound quote, I really like it because it kind of speaks to what we’re talking about in the planning phase.

So Tony, why would you say planning is important? And what advice would you give to plan successfully?

07:59

Well, yes, as I mentioned, when I thank you for that, but yeah, the questions really good. And the quote is, as well, a planning is important.

But in sales, you can actually plan too much.

When they say analysis by paralysis, or paralysis by analysis. I said that backwards?

Thank you, Cherie, we’ll leave that in. Yes, you don’t want to you don’t want to analyze, analyze, analyze, and never take action you want to plan and then take action and then stay persistent.

But planning is important. You need to understand the buying triggers of your prospect, the industry, the budget direction of the company, their competitors, yes, you need to study their competitors.

So on the phone, you can actually say something like, Did you realize your competitors were doing XY and Z?

So they’re like, oh, okay, my competition is doing it.

So maybe I should take a look at it. So it gets them to move to set an appointment.

So getting enough information to getting your customer to take action requires proper planning, right, but you don’t want to go crazy with it.

That’s why I would do my planning after hours, right on the weekends.

And before work, waking up at three 4am helps. I’ve been doing that for a long time as well.

But yeah, planning is important.

You want to make travel the proper amount of planning, but don’t overdo it don’t burn, calling time for planning, do your planning when there’s no calling that can be.

09:17

And that brings us right to our next step of the smart, persistent sales process and that is to take action. Another great quote by Einstein he says nothing happens until something moves. Tony, what do you have to add to this?

09:29

Einstein was right on point. And for me, I think part of this is your character and everyone’s different.

People always used to describe me in one word, and it was energy. I have I’ve had a high motor since I was young. I waking up early getting going immediately.

As soon as I wake up, I’m up. There’s no ramp up nothing. And anybody that knows me Cherie can speak to it.

My mom, anybody even friends listening to this. I’m gonna go that’s one thing with me.

We’re moving forward, but for better or worse, we’re moving forward.

I’m at the gym by four or five, office by seven and off we go, taking action to start today, taking my breaks to plan, adjust and taking action again.

And round around you go, you’ll notice the repetition of success, the repetition of success is boring.

There’s doing the same thing over and over, gets boring, but the results is they give you results. Right?

So the repetition of success, I would say is, is boring. But when you when you have a high motor, you have that energy to keep having the repetition, right.

So SPS smart, persistent sales embodies how I’ve lived and worked for the last 30 plus years, some parts I was better at than others, the taking action part was never a problem for me.

As I got older, and more experienced in sales, the planning part became better and better.

And I was staying persistent, but having smart persistence, right?

Make tracking, measuring and making proper adjustments as you go.

But yeah, action is a part. Without the action, there’s nothing you can plan.

And you can make adjustments. But there’s no adjustments to make if no action is taken.

So for me the biggest part of his action, I’ll take someone that will move over someone that will plan all day, I want someone with the action that’s going to move forward.

That’s why sales isn’t for everybody, right? I didn’t want to sit in a cubicle my whole career, I wanted to be out meeting people action be around people that fit my personality.

So, you know, as they say, someone has a salesman’s personality, I would say that for me, that’s really what it was.

11:33

So before we get to question three, just to add on to the taken action and the planning, we’ve taken with planning, do you do a day to day planning a week planning?

Or do you actually have a roadmap with some goals at the end?

11:46

Good question.

The answer is yes, you want to have in sales, part of the planning that we will be teaching in our smart persistent sales coaching, is in your planning phase, you have daily action items, weekly action items, monthly action items, quarterly action items, and some things in the CRM or even put to a yearly task once a year to check in with somebody.

And these are things that develop as you’re reaching out.

And when there is no interest. They don’t have any active projects. If you’re in it, right, you’re selling IT staffing, you’re looking for someone that’s in charge of a project.

So you reached out to the manager who’s in charge of it. And all their projects, they don’t have any new projects starting till March. Well, you put a you put a note in the CRM to stay in touch.

So you have planning to stay in touch right that’s so the CRM automates a lot of the planning to stay in touch. So you have staying in touch plant, you have plans to stay in touch with people plans to make cold calls.

So there’s plans for administrative tasks.

There’s a planning for the tasks that have action items like making calls, audit, getting the email, email campaign set up the drips, going, setting up your sales funnels, going to networkers.

So yes, I think that answers the question.

13:02

Yeah, it answers the question now of doing things with the CRM tool and helping you plan out your days and your weeks. Just off the cuff, do you have a long term goal or a plan a destination where you’re going with these with these at least?

13:16

Yes, everything’s in everything. That’s that’s probably one of the that is the first place you start in the planning phase. What are the goal images, the goal images are to set, we say tape, we say, plan, take action, stay persistent and set one.

Even in our slogan set one that’s telling you the goal is to set an appointment, you need to set one appointment at least one appointment a day.

So you you have these goal images that you sit down with your sales manager, if you are the sales manager, and you’re managing the sales teams, you have they need to understand you’re making these calls today to set appointments, you’re not making calls to sell over the phone, we’re looking for you to set two to three appointments a day, or whatever the quota is.

So every salesperson listening to this knows that you have a quota.

That’s that is the objective, right? What is the goal, we want to set five appointments a week, we want to, we want to close one of those appointments. So we want to get one new piece of business a week.

And then sometimes you put goal images that are financial – that are common phases, we want to close $10,000 This week or $20,000 This week, or $100,000 this month.

So there’s financial goal images. But definitely you start with goal images in mind, and you work backwards how to attain the goal.

So always starting with the end in mind, what are you trying to do? And that’s what our program does, it puts the system’s proven systems and processes in place to so you have repeatable results to get results and not be able to repeat them or teach someone how to get them or use.

14:44

That’s really great. And that brings us to the third part of this day persistence program.

Is that the persistence part? Now we all know that sometimes people get a little bit lazy or fall off or, or kind of have things that will slow them down. I’ll put on that.

Do you think that persistence is something that anyone can do? Or do you think some people are just naturally born with that?

15:07

Great question. I think both. Yeah, let me explain. I think a big part of persistence is is your personality, the mindset we have, I believe we have a mindset that’s developed how we were raised.

There’s some of that is genetics, some people are a little bit more, you know, I have a high motor. I mean, I did as a kid, I walked early, I started talking early.

And I get up early to go to school, I’d finish my assignments quicker. That didn’t mean it was good. Sometimes I was too fast.

And I did things wrong and had to go redo them – common phases.

So there’s, there’s there’s being too persistent, right? That’s why we say smart persistence, not just going 100 miles an hour in the wrong direction.

You want to have persistence, that that’s why you track measure the results.

Look at the results, and are they getting you closer to your goal? Are you talking to enough people? Are you saying the right things? Are you setting enough appointments?

Are you setting enough profitable appointments? Are you making appointments with people that’s not profitable, but just to set appointments, set an appointment?

Makes no sense.

So persistence is something I think part of it’s inside you, I was born with it, because I had a high motor, you couldn’t get me to stop trying, though. I just kept going and going and going and going.

So when you’re built like that, I’d say you should look into a career in sales, or being an entrepreneur and starting a business because it requires that persistence to keep going.

So if you’re a low energy person, and you don’t like taking action, and you want to analyze, analyze, analyze, analyze, sales might not be you’ll probably get pretty frustrated with sales, especially sales that require cold calling in to me most any business will have some type of cold calling to set appointments unless you’re in retail, but even then, I might be wanting to have some type of networker at my retail store to promote my store.

And I need to call people to set appointments for them to come to the networker.

So, one way or another, you’re going to use the phone to set some type of appointment, and you need to have a high motor, you’re born with a piece of it.

And some of it can be taught you can have the discipline (common phases) to develop a persistent mindset, which is some of the peak, which is I think, I think let me rephrase.

I know, in the smart persistent sales coaching program, Cherie is going to handle the mindset piece of that persistent mindset, right, understanding that you need to keep pushing, but in a smart way.

17:24

Yes, Tony, a mindset is really important – and the common phases. Everything that we do starts off with a thought. So just to add on as well, with the persistence, what good advice would you give to somebody who you see that is good, how you some help and some strengthening in this area?

17:43

Yeah, good question. As I mentioned, some of it is what you bring just internally what you’re born with what you’ve developed, as you’ve as you’ve got to where you are, right, if you’re young, in your early 20s, starting out, or I started at 13. So I was pre I was kind of predisposed, I didn’t really have a choice.

I wanted a jeans and I had to go knock on door. So I went and did it. Almost like you have no choice.

I think persistence comes from your why. So I would if I would see someone having trouble with persistence, I would I would dig into what’s what’s there.

Why? What’s the motivation? Right, it because I can, you can motivate people, you can give them things that are motivational, right? This motivates you the same motivate you read this book, read that book.

But there comes a point for a person that they have to take the action, and then they have to follow a process.

Discipline is doing what’s required. I give you a process that works has proven results. And it says you need to reach out eight, not eight times nine times 10 times (common phases). If the process says reach out 10 times. And after six you stop.

You’re not following the process. You don’t have the discipline. So there’s another word you throw into persistence.

You need to have the discipline to be precise.

19:12

So you would say that the discipline and persistence are parallel that they they work in unison with each

19:17

other million percent. I am yeah, million percent the most. All the success of successful people that you see professional athletes, professional tennis players, professional football players, professional basketball players, they all grew up.

Most people grew up with people that had the same level of skill or some people or came across people that had the skill.

Why did one person make it to the NBA and the other person didn’t. They had to discipline to take 10,000 jump shots, they had to discipline to work on their weak areas.

They had the discipline to not go out drinking and party at night but go back home and rest and keep their body in good condition so they can perform at a professional level.

The sales that we are talking about is we are professionals, we follow the process that is being professional having the discipline to follow the process.

So it comes down to their motivation, their level of discipline, and how professional are they willing to be?

Is this just a job to make some money over the summer?

Well, that motivation is not that high. Because there’s a million jobs you can go have to make money over the summer.

But I took sales to me was like, live, eat like breathing air. Right? I just I love it. I can talk it all day, read it all day. It’s just, it’s just how I’m wired. I love the common phases of sales.

So I would say looking at the motivation and level of discipline to do what’s necessary.

20:40

So how many people during your your sales career with being persistent? How many times do you think you would have to follow on somebody for to get a sale through follow up?

And what is the longest amount of time that you can just recall off the top of your head that you’ve had to keep in touch and follow up with somebody until you eventually got them? And close the sale?

21:01

But I’ll answer the second part of the question first, how long I’ve I’ve stayed in touch with someone for two years.

And eventually, we ended up working together and this was an IT. And it was it accounted for over 200 people? Staffing, so but it took time. It took time. The timing wasn’t right. And, and the persistence, and I would always ask, Can I stay in touch? And they say, Sure.

And you know, most people don’t. But I you know, it was it was it was in my CRM and the discipline in my CRM and popped up to contact them once a quarter once every six months.

And after about four times, or three times.

You know, how many months later, we had a meeting and several months into it, then it turned into something but just that’s what the CRM is important for, because a lot of it, you’re going to forget, you’re going to need to put your notes in the CRM that we get into CRMs.

But, you know, tracking, tracking, tracking, tracking what said tracking activity, tracking progress tracking when you need, you know, having a follow up system, all that the systems and everything in place are important.

That’s what professional sales is about, is tracking and measuring all the activity.

22:14

That’s a really excellent example of staying persistent. Thank you.

22:17

Sure. Yeah. So today, we learned a lot and we were a little long today.

But what we’ll do on episodes like this moving forward, we’ll split them in half.

We’ll have a part one and part two, we’ll leave this longer version out.

We’re trying to keep our shows to about five minutes or less because you guys are learning about us. Right. But if you did make it to the end of the show. Thank you.

We learned a lot about smart persistence sales, and what it’s about, right planning, taking action, staying persistent and setting one.

So TonyK and CherieV reminding everybody too…

22:47

Stay persistent and take action!
 

22:50

CherieV say it backwards. Thank you

22:53

…for listening. We hope that you learned something on our show. If you enjoy our show, please like, subscribe and share.

Hey Tony, say something funny!

Why did the salesman cross the road to set an appointment!