Got a Light?

Great outdoors men probably make great salespeople, or surgeons, or aerial stunt pilots for that matter. That's because a skilled outdoors man a) would rather be no place else nor doing anything else and b) knows that if his excursion is to be successful, there can be no shortcuts.

Now suppose it's dinner time in the woods and our Daniel Boone is going to roast today's catch over an open fire. No matches and no lighter. So it's the old rubbing two sticks together trick. He rubs and rubs and and just when the sticks are getting warm, he gets tired and decides to take a short break and resume in a few minutes, right? Wrong! Even we non-Boy Scouts know that if you stop before you get a flame, you go back to square one. There's no picking up where you left off.

Or---let's go back a few hours to the stream where he's fly casting for dinner. He throws out four or five Orvis three-day-course casts and---nothing. So he decides to take a break for a while, right? Wrong! No fish, no dinner and so it's cast after cast, with breaks only to try new flies, until he lands one. But because outdoors men are in love with what they do and tenacious in their efforts, they get more skilled over time.

So do great sellers!

My guess is that you will convert more calls to appointments the more calls you make in concentrated time periods. No breaks (other than for brief "what went wrong, or right" re-plays). Call after call after call. However, if you wait an appreciable time between each call you will be no better at getting appointments after the 500th call than you were after the first. That's because no learning from previous calls stick unless they are made in successive, collapsed time frames. It's learning theory, that's all. We need multiple impressions in successive and brief interludes to learn.

First visit, information gathering sessions? Same. Proposals? Same. Closing skills? Same. Average or good--to great? Same.

Great Selling!

Love Your Work and Work Tirelessly
Communicate Honestly and Fearlessly
Serve, Don't Sell
Collapse Time
Teamwork