Going to the Sales Gym – Step 6: Working Your Lower Body (Process)

Our lower body is something we take for granted; especially when we are young. In fact, if you look around any gym, you will find that the majority of the equipment is designed for working your upper body. It makes sense that it should be like this. Our eyes are in our upper body and therefore our upper body is more in our field of vision. Subconsciously we would spend more time on our upper body because that is what we see the most. All of the sudden you find yourself doing curls, bench presses and pullovers and, if time allows, maybe we’ll do a leg press.  Ironically, our lower body carries our upper body, and this is just as true in sales. We assume that the lower body is there and that it is going to work as it should, but why bother exercising it much? No one else is paying much attention to it anyway, right? Well, maybe you should. Besides, it would be almost impossible to build your vision of an ideal body on top of a set of chicken legs (no offense to my more slender readers, I also don’t look great in short shorts). But as salespeople, most of us have chicken legs trying to support what we hope is a well sculpted torso, or what is most likely an overworked upper body.  What is the lower body in terms of sales? What are you walking around on that you are almost never paying attention to? What is carrying the rest of your sales body? What are these scrawny chicken legs that you call sales muscles? It is your sales process. Most of you probably don’t even realize you have a sales process, but you definitely have one. If you can’t describe it, then you have chicken legs in terms of a sales person. Don’t be too embarrassed; there is a reason why we sales people always wear long pants. We are able to walk around well enough on our nimble sales strategies (if you can call it that) so there is no need to put time into those muscles until we find out that we can only walk and not run.  Let’s face it, creating, defining and executing your sales process every day is not easy for everyone. Your process is not just what you do, it is how you do it. How do you seek and engage new customers? How do you learn their needs? How do you deliver and follow up on proposals? How do you set up your next steps to close the deal? How will you demonstrate the customer experience to your prospects? I bet you are starting to look down at your chicken legs now. Here is an even tougher question, how are you measuring your sales process to see if it even works? Gee, if only there was a magical sales scorecard company that already has something available. Hey, look here – your Sales Scorecard. Take the time to sketch out your sales process from start to finish. Do you follow it consistently? Is it effective? Are you aware of it when you use it? Does it carry all the other elements of your sales? Are you willing to let someone else look at your process to get their insight (“Hey Bob, take a look at my chicken legs and tell me what you think)”. The first thing someone wants to do when they want to exercise their legs is to get on the treadmill. Getting on the treadmill does not count as exercising your lower body. I will admit that it does help, but that belongs in a different set of exercises all together. That’s cardio and we are going to discuss that in Step 7.

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