The Power of Routine Maintenance

We humans are novelty-seeking creatures. We are attracted to anything that is new and exciting. Some new tools and new ideas can revolutionize your sales efforts and produce new and exciting results; they are worth looking into. However, much of what you need to do to succeed in sales is simple, disciplined, routine maintenance.

There is a difference between disciplines and goals. There is a difference between activity and effectiveness. Activity that is taken sporadically produces sporadic results. Disciplined, routine maintenance is not sporadic and produces predictable results—especially over the long term.

The Routine Maintenance of Prospecting

The laws of the sales universe are such that the more desperate you are to fill your pipeline with new opportunities, the more difficult it is too achieve that outcome.

The routine maintenance of building and maintaining your sales pipeline is daily prospecting. No opportunity is ever closed that isn’t first opened, and you must continually open new relationships. It is an activity that, to produce great results, needs to be approached as a daily, disciplined routine.

Prospecting sporadically produces stress, missed commitments, and the desperation that leads to taking something less than your dream client. The power of prospecting day after day, week after week, and month after month is that it produces a pipeline of opportunities.

The Routine Maintenance of Nurturing

To succeed in sales you need to develop the relationships that you need to win before you need them.

Nurturing your dream clients, while being perhaps the most important activity you can take towards your success, is never urgent. There is no way to cram relationships, and there is no way to cram trust. These things take a careful, determined, and active patience.

Nurturing relationships, like prospecting, isn’t an activity that can be taken sporadically and produce predictable results. The power of nurturing as a routine maintenance is that it builds trust and the relationships you need before you need them.

The Routine Maintenance of Existing Client Relationships

You made promises to your existing clients when they were just a dream. You have kept those promises. But resting on your laurels is a recipe for disaster.

When your client’s needs change, or when their world throws something unexpected at them, you need to be there to help them overcome the obstacles or capitalize on the opportunities. Not being there, and not proactively working to anticipate and adapt to their changing needs allows dissatisfaction to creep in—the same kind of dissatisfaction that created the opportunity that brought your dream client to you.

The power of the routine maintenance of your existing clients is that it demonstrates that you care enough to walk your talk, and that you are a proactive partner for the long term.

Take care of the daily routine maintenance and let the routine daily maintenance take care of you.

Questions

What are the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly routines that you need to run in order to be successful?

What are the challenges to doing the routine maintenance that produces the results that you need?

What are the unhealthy, time-stealing routines that you run daily, but that limit your effectiveness?

What routines would recommend to other salespeople that would make them more effective?