When I opened the email, the first sentence jumped out me: "I've just been to your website and your company is a perfect fit for our services!" Clearly the seller was really excited about his discovery.
On the other hand, I was backpedaling as fast as I could. I wanted nothing to do with him. If he'd caught me on the phone, my instincts would have immediately erected barricades. If we were meeting in person, objections would be spewing from my mouth.
When I hung up the phone, I was in a state of shock. I'd just agreed to do something that was vital to my business growth, yet totally unreasonable to accomplish in only 90 days. To top it off - I had no extra time in my already over-flowing schedule.
It all started when leadership coach Caitlin Miller invited me to participate in the Breakthrough Game. When it came time to identify my goal, she insisted that I select one that was the "other side of possible."
So, with a great deal of angst and a bit of excitement, I committed to increase my database by 50% in three months.
Was I crazy? Perhaps. But trying to pull this off in such a short timeframe was a challenge I couldn't resist.
The Failure of Incrementalism
Most of us are used to dealing with incremental goals. Our quota goes up 15% each year. We decide that we'd like to earn 10% more money. We'd want to increase our closing ratio by 5%.
These small increases keep us thinking and acting small. We commit to making one extra call each day. We focus on working harder. Perhaps we even think about working smarter.
But the reality of it is, incremental goals feel like a burden. They don't inspire us to greater heights. Mostly, they just wear us down as we face a never-ending cycle of doing more, more, more.
The Real Secret to Success
When we set unreachable goals that require us to stretch beyond what we think we're capable of achieving, we're forced to consider new options.
Take my situation: It took me seven years to build by database to its current size. Now I needed to increase it by 50% in a totally unrealistic timeframe. Clearly, my normal modus operandi wouldn't work.
New strategies were needed - ones that I'd never considered before. I had to think differently about this challenge.
I started by asking new questions:
I was recently asked, "If you were mentoring a new salesperson, what would be your top five sales tips and how did you learn those?"
It started exactly 12 months ago, right after SNAP Selling came out. At first I didn't recognize the symptoms, but in retrospect, they were there. I was crazy-busy, running from one "must do" activity to the next. My inbox overflowed. I was constantly online, answering emails, tweeting, blogging, whatever.
I dream of hot prospects who call me up and say, “We’ve heard good things about your company. We want to make a decision quickly. We’re hoping you can help us out.”
When was the last time you made your crazy-busy prospects really stop and think? If you’re just spouting self-serving sales talk, the answer is probably never. But if you’ve developed at least some level of expertise in your field and aren’t using it, you’re letting opportunities slip by.
Crazy-busy prospects can't handle complexity. They hate it when things are difficult to decode, decide or decipher. It grinds them to a screeching halt - which is the normal human reaction to being overwhelmed and stressed out.
How can I possibly be overwhelmed before the day has even started? Yet this morning, as I sit down at my desk to get to work, that's exactly how I feel.
My To Do list is overflowing with calls to make, proposals to write, customers to satisfy. Checking my email only makes things worse. Now another 72 people want my attention. I sometimes wonder if there's any light at the end of the tunnel.
Sound familiar?
What's really going on inside the minds of those frazzled customers that causes them to keep you at a distance, brush you off, dismiss you entirely, or stick with the status quo?
Once you recognize how they think, and what you're doing that is bringing them to the breaking point, you can make changes to your own behavior.
Take Xerox, for example. I’ll never forget the first time I sat in on a team meeting after I’d been promoted to major accounts. We were supposed to “get in bed with our customers.” Sales was about seduction and scoring was the ultimate goal! [I'm not a prude, but as a woman I was appalled at the conversations.]