Episode #166: 2020 Ushers In New Deals - Are We Ready To Get Our Share

Greek myths don’t have too many happy endings or uplifting messages. Mostly they are cautionary tales about the Gods treating us like playthings, usually with unhappy consequences. The patron Greek myth for salespeople is the one about Sisyphus. The son of Aeolus, the God of the Winds, he was sent down to Hades to be punished by fulfilling the eternal task of rolling a large stone to the top of a hill, just to watch it roll to the bottom and then start again, and again, and again forever. That is what we do.

We roll that big stone of the annual budget to the top of the sales year, when the revenue results are announced, to watch it roll back to zero as we start the whole process again, year after year. “Don’t tell me about your last deal, tell me about the next deal” is the driving sales manager philosophy. It has been thus ever since they created sales managers. It doesn’t matter when your firm arbitrarily decides that the sales year kicks off, the phenomenon is the same. 2020 is here – are you ready to roll or keep rolling that big stone?

The tension, pressure, uncertainty, fear and foreboding are unrelenting in sales. You had a good year last year. You won an award at the sales convention, you were on stage getting your medal, you got your big bonus, you made some good money. So what? That was last year, what about this year? Alternatively this last year was dismal, you hardly made any money at all and you were a hair’s breadth away from being axed. So what? That was last year, what about this year? Good year or bad year, the rock rolling awaits you.

There are deals to be done in every year, so there is business out there. How much of it will come to you? If you are sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, the email to hit the inbox, the buyer to walk in then you are too stupid to be in sales. Harsh! Yes, but true, because that type of approach is what idiots do and why they are not successful. We need to do better than that.

Grant Cardone is a sales trainer in the US and he has a book called “The 10 X Rule”. The basic proposition is a good one. We have taken Grant’s idea and have a big signboard on the wall of our office that says “10 X Your Thoughts and Actions”. The issue we all face is we get into a rhythm with rock rolling. We look for incremental gains. The 10X idea is to look for big gains, how to leapfrog our rivals all focused on kaizen scale improvements. To get anywhere we need to change our thinking. The same thinking that got you last year’s result will only get you to roughly the same point. We need to get to a much higher point. By challenging our thinking, we start to operate at a different level. The next step is to put those thoughts into action. Genius thoughts unapplied are not much help.

Is applying a 10X philosophy easy? Obviously super easy for the first thirty seconds, but it gets a bit tougher after that. This is where we need discipline and the sales manager to be driving this thinking everyday. It means we have t look at every angle on rolling that rock up the hill. Who has bought from us recently? Are there other firms who likely have the same need but don’t know about us. Are we shy about cold calling them, because we fear rejection and that the effort will be wasted because the success rate is so low? Is sitting around waiting for lightening to strike a better use of our time?

Remember always that in sales we have the cure for cancer and we need to get it to as many sufferers as possible. Each of our firms provide a great solution for companies. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t still be in business. We can’t cure an individual’s cancer, with our solutions, but we can cure corporate cancers that afflict our clients. When we understand this idea, we have no fear to contact companies who don't know us and inform them we have the cure.

If we 10X our thinking on this point and we take massive 10X action, then we will get the meetings we need with buyers and we will get deals one. The new year is a great time to readjust our thinking about how to roll our stone up the hill. How can we 10X this activity from start to end. It has to rolled. Let’s look for 10X ways to do it this year.