If you want results, first you have to do the work.
You can have any result you want, provided you're willing to pay the price in advance. This is obviously a sales blog, so we talk a lot about sales here, but we also talk also about leadership, management, productivity, and personal success—and that's what a lot of people come here for. Let’s talk about doing the work because that's the most important part of anything.
The Work of Creating New Opportunities
If you want new opportunities and new sales, the work begins with researching, identifying, and targeting your dream clients. There's a set of clients that are going to perfectly resonate with your value proposition. They're going to look at you through the lens of their problem and recognize that you have the answer to take them from where they are to the future that they want. But you have to do the work of nurturing those clients.
I can't tell you how many people aren't doing the work of prospecting because they haven't made a list of their dream clients, identifying the stakeholders within that client account. Without doing that work, you can’t make the calls.
If you're already nurturing your clients and you're not getting the results you need, it's because there's a lot of noise out there that says inbound marketing and social selling are enough. The same people claim that you need to build a brand so people come to you, but you need to be realistic. There are not salespeople in your market right now that have 60,000 clients beating down their door because they've established a brand through social selling. That's content marketing, not sales. It’s above the funnel and it's important, but it’s a long-term play. Establishing a good LinkedIn profile, and doing the work on social to connect with people makes sense, but it won’t help you create enough opportunities to succeed.
In the short term, you have to create opportunities every single day, and if they're not coming in at the level you need in inbound, then you move to outbound. In fact, as a salesperson, you should put outbound first. Make the calls. If you're not making the calls, you can't expect to have the appointments that are necessary to build the pipeline that you need. Opportunity creation comes before opportunity capture. The work of opportunity capture is controlling the process, creating value for your buyer at every stage of their process, collaborating with them to build a solution that they can say yes to, building consensus inside their organization, reviewing ideas, and asking for investments. It's all the things that allow you to be a value creator and a trusted advisor. If you're not doing that work, you can't expect to win. And you don’t do the work to create opportunities, you won’t have a chance at capturing them.
Finding Your Personal KPI
Most of the time, there's a gap between the results you want and the results you're generating right now. That gap is going to be closed by doing the work necessary to produce the necessary outcomes. If you've got a financial KPI you're shooting for, like your quota or your company’s KPI, it should be tied to your own personal KPI. That means it’s the number that makes you say, “This is what I want to earn. This is the lifestyle that I want to choose for myself and my family.” Hitting that KPI takes certain outcomes. In sales, that means you're delivering solutions that you developed, presenting, resolving concerns, controlling the process, and having those meetings.
Activity Always Precedes Outcomes
Once you’ve done the work that goes into prospecting and meeting with clients, you can look at other KPIs. If you're not getting the outcomes you want, then you have to look at your activity, which is a subject many salespeople avoid. Unfortunately, sales managers don't want to talk about it either. But even if you ignore it, activity always precedes outcome.
If you're not getting the sales outcomes you need, you're not going to get the personal and financial outcomes you want for yourself. That means you need to go back to activity and decide who to nurture. Ask yourself: What relationships do I need to develop? Who do I need to call to get an appointment? Who has the kind of problems that I can solve? How can I get in front of them? How can I start creating opportunities? Then, you need to do the work of capturing those opportunities, because that's how you succeed.
If you're not getting the result you want, it's not because you're not good enough. I'm sure you are. It's not that you can't learn to do these things, it’s not that there's no information available for you all over the web, so that you can figure out how to improve some of these things, it's because you're not willing to do the work. Be willing to do the work, and be willing to outwork anyone else. Because if you're being out-hustled that's a choice.
