Warren Wechsler, founder and president of Total Selling Inc., presents this practical, hands-on guide to being a Total Sales Person. In an easy to follow format, Wechsler explains how to develop an ef...

The Basics of Total Selling

Excerpted from Total Selling by Warren Wechsler © 2004

Let’s look at the experiences of three salespeople.

Rob had a plan. He intended to be one of the top ten salespeople in his company. He knew exactly how much business he needed to write. He utilized good sales practices, as he wrote all his action items in his personal planner and he recorded every interaction with his prospects in great detail in his daily diary. Yet he didn’t achieve his goals because he didn’t know who his best prospects were, how many prospects he needed, and what to say on the initial approach. Rob was missing a key component for sales excellence. Once he understood and mastered an effective sales process, he rocketed to the top ten in six months.

Catherine had more ambition, made more calls, and had seven times more accounts than any other salesperson in her organization. She was also below average in sales revenue and income. Why? Because Catherine had no idea what the big picture was. She mistook busy work and any activity with proper and prioritized actions. After learning and integrating the components of a sound sales plan into her selling career, Catherine stopped calling on two-thirds of her accounts, worked less, earned more, and had more fun.

Alan was always a day late and a dollar short. Although he had a model sales plan and could define down to the finest detail what his sales process looked like, he was a failure. When asked who he was going to call today, what he and his clients discussed last time, and what the next steps were, he was clueless. He was so frustrated that he was about to leave his profession after ten years and start all over again doing something else. After he learned how to apply best sales practices to become a superior self-manager, however, Alan became a leader in his company, sought out by others for guidance and counsel. Fifteen years later, he is the number one salesperson in his office and has realized all of his dreams.

The Three Ps
I have a confession to make. I was trained by the “go get ’em” model. I was hired by a terrific company with a great reputation, wonderful products and services, and hundreds of salespeople. One day after eighteen months in the “sales training” program, I had spent weeks to months in accounting, finance, manufacturing, distribution, store services, catalog, marketing, etc., etc., etc. Every aspect of the business, except sales. I was approached by the vice president of sales one day. He called me into his office and, with great enthusiasm, told me that I was ready to graduate from the sales trainee program and would be assigned a sales territory. And here came my sales education: “Warren, go get ’em!”

It didn’t work for me and it won’t work for you. “Go get ’em” is not a sales process.

What makes a champion selling superstar? In my view there are three absolute, nonnegotiable, paramount principles that we must follow in order to be champions in selling: process, plan, and practice. In order to be a champion in sales, we have to understand and use the three P’s. We have to have a sales process. We have to be prepared. And we have to practice our craft. It’s simple, definable, and repeatable—and anyone can learn how to do it.

Process
Sales process means that we have a system in place by which we run our sales business. Many people are trained in sales using that “go get ’em” model. Well, “Go get ’em” doesn’t work. You have to have a process. You have to have an understanding of how you’re going to implement a selling system.

Let’s look at how mastering a process is involved in some other areas of life. Let’s begin with golf. The process begins with driving. You have to get the ball off the tee.

Then you’re onto the fairway. You have to understand how to get the ball down the fairway. And you need to master the short game, putting. Those are the three ideas involved in golf.

Of course, there are sand wedges, blasting out of traps, getting out of water, and all that. But the fundamentals are driving, short game, and putting.

How about my specialty, long-distance running? The process is to run a long, slow distance as a base, hill work to build your stamina and strength, and speed work to enhance your leg turnover so you can run fast for a long amount of time.

What about selling? Is there a process in selling? Should we just wing it? Should we wait for the phone to ring? Of course not.

In order to be successful in sales, you have to have an explicit process in mind. You’re going to learn such a process as you become a Total Salesperson.

Plan
USA Today once ran a number of articles about Tiger Woods. One concerned Tiger Woods when he was a young man—how he put up a plaque on the wall in his room that listed all the achievements of Jack Nicklaus.

Anybody who follows golf knows that Jack Nicklaus has the nickname “The Golden Bear.” For twenty-five years, he had been absolutely the number-one name in golf. He’s got more major championships than anyone else—eighteen, I think. He’s the best of the best.

Tiger Woods’ plaque showed all of Jack Nicklaus’s accomplishments: how many amateur titles he had won, how old he was when he won his first major, how old he was when he won his career grand slam, how many majors, and tournaments, and dollars in
earnings he had. All this stuff.

The fact is that Tiger knew what he wanted to do from a very young age—he had a plan. In order to be sales champions, we also have to know what we want. We have to do what Steven Covey says: “Begin with the end in mind.”

Have a plan. Know where you’re going. It’s called a “strategic sales plan.”

Let’s look at these words one at a time. “Strategic” means that we are taking into consideration the big picture factors that might affect our business. “Strategic” means that we understand the economic and environmental climate, we understand our competition,
we understand our marketing position, we understand our own strengths and weaknesses, and we know what type of business we’re likely to get from our current customers and what amount of business we need to create on our own.

“Sales” means that it’s a concept that is all about selling. It’s not a marketing plan, it’s not an operating plan, and it’s not a business plan. It’s how we’re going to maintain and grow our sales.

The final concept is “plan.” If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up in a place you never intended. So the saying goes. A plan based on sound strategy and focused on sales will get us where we need to go. At over the age of fifty, my ability to again get my marathon time under three hours is going to depend to a large extent on my ability to put together a sound plan. Planning is what helped me attain excellence in running in 1991 and planning is going to help me be excellent in 2005.

Sales practice is the essence of implementation. Sales practice is the execution. Sales practice is getting out of the stands and into the game. Sales practice is doing the activity every day that (when tied to an effective sales process, and based on a sound plan) will guarantee that we will be the best salespeople we possibly can.

What’s in your strategic sales plan? You have to understand many things to have a good strategic sales plan, including:

• How much business did you generate from your current clients last year?
• How much business are you expecting this year?
• What type of prospects are you going to go after this year?
• Who are your key accounts?
• Who are your targeted key customers?
• What type of revenue can you expect by geography, by industry, and by type of product and service?
• What are your annual goals?
• How are you going to break it down into quarterly targets?
• What’s your monthly plan?
• What do you have to do every day in order to implement this plan to ensure your success?

If you’re Lance Armstrong, do you wake up one day and say, “Oh, I think I’d like to ride in the Tour de France. What’s that date in July? I’ll just show up at the starting line on July 3, 2004.”

Well, obviously it’s not like that at all! You have to, he has to, we all have to prepare. Where do you want to go? How are you going to get there?

I’ll tell you right now I’m looking to get back to the form I had in 1991, when I looked like and ran like an elite marathon runner. I was 38 then and weighed 127 pounds. My body fat was under 10 percent. I was up to between seventy and ninety miles a week. I had everything planned out by the month, by the day, by the week, and by the year.

In 1991, I had eleven consecutive races where I set a PR (personal record). This was at distances from as little as 5K, where I went under 17 minutes at the age of 38, to the marathon where I ran a 2:53. I was 208th out of 6,500 runners at the age of 38.

As I reflect on why I was good, it came down to preparation, and now I’m starting to get back to that same type of mindset. We’ll see where it takes me. We’ll see if, with good planning, I can get back to that same level of fitness fifteen years later.

Practice
Practice, practice, practice. You certainly can have an identifiable, repeatable, measurable sales process. You can sit around all day long and prepare your sales plan, but like everything in sports, business, or life, you’ve got to get out there and practice it.

Larry Bird, the great Boston Celtics basketball player, was once in a slump. He’s one of the greatest shooters ever to play the game, but he hadn’t been shooting well in his last four or five games. There are people who play the game for ten years and become half as good as Larry Bird, but he hadn’t been shooting well and, for him, that’s a slump.

So what did Larry Bird do? He went back to the fundamentals. He went to the arena and he shot ball after ball, hour after hour.

What about Lance Armstrong, from the cycling analogy? People ask, “Lance, how come you’re so good at what you do?” There’s a commercial that Lance is in—I think it’s for one of the shoe manufacturers or a sports drink—in which he looks right in the camera and says, “My butt’s on my bike six hours a day.” That’s his edge. He trains; he practices.

Marathon runners put in 70, 80, 90, 100-mile weeks. What about selling? What’s the practice? What’s the practical application of selling?

It’s taking action, making the calls—spending the time, as it were, in the saddle. It means keeping track, keeping score, following up, making sure you’re doing the things that you know are going to make you successful.

Isaac Stern, the great violinist was once asked, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Do you know what his answer was? “Practice, practice, practice.” Here he was in his nineties and he still practiced up to six hours a day. When someone said, “You’re a maestro. You’re a virtuoso. People come from all over the world to hear you play. Why in the world do you have to practice?” With a twinkle in his eye, he said, “You know, I think I’m getting better.” Practice is what it’s all about.