Thinking and Questioning Your Way to Sales Success – Part 2

by Dave Kahle

Excerpted from Chapter Seventeen, Question Your Way to Sales Success,  by Dave Kahle

In part one of this series, I made the point that thinking better is the ultimate success skill for a sales person, and that good thinking always came from asking yourself the right questions and writing down the answers.  Sounds so simple.  Yet, only a handful of true professionals adhere to that discipline.

          I listed some times to ask yourself questions, and some good questions to ask yourself, as they related to improving your personal sales effectiveness.  In this installment, I’m going to focus on questions to ask to drive your overall  improvement as a professional sales person.

          Personal Improvement Questions

The personal effectiveness questions that we reviewed in part one are based on the premise that you can choose to do things that are more effective than others.  You have a choice of how to invest your sales time, and you make those decisions about that investment by following certain thinking disciplines.  The focus is on the decision you make about what to do.

          The questions in this section focus on you having the ability to do what you say you want to do.  In other words, before you can do something, you have to be able to do it.  If for example, you say, I’m going to play in a basketball game tomorrow, that is a decision that proceeds out of the first section – what to do.  It assumes, however, that you have the ability to play the game – that you can pass, dribble, shoot and defend.  It has to do with how well you can do that which you said you were going to do.  The focus is on the quality of what you do.

          It is one thing to say, “I’m going to call on this huge potential account.”  It is quite another to say, “And I’m going to be very competent in that sales call.”

          In this section, we are going to examine those questions that lead to your improvement in quality – in the core sales competencies that are used throughout the sales process and which, in conjunction with your decisions as to what to do, ultimately impact your performance as a sales person.  Superstar sales people do the right things, and then do them with quality – in the right way.

          You’ll notice the questions we asked ourselves in the previous installment proceeded from the top down – from the general to the specific.  In other words, we determined, from an annual perspective, what we wanted to do, and then broke those down into ever more specific increments.

          The questions we are going to consider in this section are best created in exactly the opposite method – from the specific to the general.  Let’s begin at the bottom, the most specific application we can think of, and then gradually compile our responses to move to the more general.

          Daily questions

Start with a sales call.  After every sales call, stop for a moment or two and ask yourself the two questions with which we ended the previous section:

What went well?  What could I have done better the next time?

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          Remember, good thinking is asking yourself the right questions, in the right sequence, and writing down the answers.  This is a great habit to develop –taking a moment after every sales call and asking and answering those two questions.  As you do so, you’ll uncover trends and patterns in your behavior that need to be addressed and improved.  You’ll also come to a more complete understanding of your strengths and how to parley them into greater results.

          The act of asking and answering those questions also helps build a basic mind-set that is essential for the success of a field sales person.  Notice that the focus of the questions is on your behavior – “What could I have done…”

          Sooner or later, every sales person must take responsibility for their own results.  Sales is a proactive profession – we act, and our actions get reactions.  If we act well, having made good choices for the investment of our sales time, and acted well, with quality, we get better results.  So, the ultimate determinant of our success is our actions.

          That seems like such a simple truth – that our results are determined by our actions – that it hardly bears mentioning.  Unfortunately, I find expressions of the lack of this mindset everywhere.  In almost every company with whom I become involved, there is somewhere within that organization a belief that it is someone else’s problem, someone else’s decisions that impact the individual’s performance.  As long as we consider ourselves victims, we will never shoulder the responsibility to shape and improve our own behavior, and thus positively impact our results.  These questions, asked over and over, help to instill the idea deeply within our world-views that we are responsible for our actions and our results.

          Having examined our performance in each sales call, we then examine the decisions and the interactions we made every day, by asking ourselves, at the end of the day, “What could I have done more effectively today?”

          This is a broader question, which encompasses both our specific in-call behavior, as well as the decisions we made throughout the day.  For example, we could answer with “I really need to become better at asking questions.”  Or something like, “That road construction on I-94 is really a problem.  Next time, I’m taking the surface streets.”

          Regardless, the answers to the question all focus on our behavior, and ascribe a future change in action.  Building the habit to continually ask these questions will lead us to decisions and actions that will eventually take us to exceptional levels of performance.

          Monthly review

When we dedicate the one-to-two hours per month to our planning session, we always begin with a reflection on the previous month.  The question I like here is this:  “Did I do what I said I was going to do?”  That question should be asked in general, for your overall performance for the month, but... READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE