There are different ways to get a baseline read on your personal health to figure out your needs as well as a good starting point. The most obvious vital sign is your total weight. You may also consider your body mass index, your stamina, your self-image, or how many sit ups you can do. Are you completely out of whack or do you just need to reacquaint with good habits that you let go of? Are you focusing on your sales fitness because you want to, or because someone is pressuring you to? Do you have trouble sticking with new plans, or do you find yourself falling back into your old bad habits after about two to four weeks? If you don’t take the time to consider these variables and just jump right back into the sales gym, your chances of success are very limited. What are some questions that you will want to ask yourself to take an honest inventory of the health of your current sales?
- How frequently, or infrequently, am I hitting my sales goals?
- Do I even have sales goals?
- How busy, or not busy, am I working new deals?
- When was the last time I asked a total stranger for their business?
- What is my deal closing rate? Do I even know what that is?
- Have I been staying fat and bloated on a couple of key accounts and if the accounts were lost, would I quickly become anemic and suffer greatly?
- Do I focus my selling proposition more on price than value?
- Do I get upset when my client is getting a quote from my competitor?
- Do I still love to sell?
There are several ways that you can reflect on your own sales fitness, but if anything in the above questions made you feel exhausted when you read them, then you are out of shape and you need help. If you want to do an overall fitness assessment of your sales organization, then we recommend starting with our Power Score Assessment. Sometimes our place of work causes us to be out of shape by the virtue of our (or lack of) sales culture. If you live in an environment where everyone sits at home on the couch, eating junk food and scoffing at the thought of exercise, you may be discouraged from self-improvement. There are ways to address these issues, but as with anything, the first place you have to start with is you. Things can always get better and, if you at least try, they usually do. Taking any kind of assessment should be honest, but not directed in a way to discourage you from trying. ‘I’m too fat, I’m too old, I’m too out of shape’, quickly become self-defeating excuses and none of them are true; especially in sales. If you are not exercising your sales muscles you will get out of shape and your sales will suffer. It happens to the best of us and it is very fixable. Your next step is figuring out what your sales fitness goals and plans are (spoiler alert, that is coming next in this series). Until then, take a deep breath, step on the scale, and look in the mirror. What do you see? This is where we will begin.
