What if I offered you a bottle of “easy pills” that would get you the results you want in your sales career, and all you had to do was take the “easy pill” every day in order for it to work? Would you take me up on the offer? (No bad side effects to this pill, by the way, just massive results in your sales.)
I bet many people would take me up on the offer and they'd go home with the bottle of "easy pills", excited about the results to come. But they’d forget to take the pill every day. They'd start to think of the pill as a hassle.
The bottle would sit forlornly on their kitchen counter, waiting to be taken. And then those individuals would grumble that the “easy pills” don’t work.
We’re often attracted to the sparkly newness of an innovative method. Understandably, we’re lured by the promise of the better outcome it will bring.
But here’s the thing: while some methods are better than others, the single most determining factor in whether a method will work or not, is consistent implementation.
In other words, the ingredients in the “easy pill” don’t matter as much as taking the pill every single day, rain or shine.
So let’s look at an example of how to put this into practice. Cold calling is arguably the most dreaded part of sales. And yet your healthy pipeline depends on it. What’s more, you may have to reach out to a single qualified prospect seven times before you get a meeting with them.
Cold calling is not easy, and yet it’s the “pill” that – if taken consistently every single day – will get you new business, without fail. (Also, the dread and procrastination before the cold call is usually worse than just swallowing the cold call pill and getting on with your day.)
Do you have a goal for the number of cold calls you will make every day? And do you have a plan for the multiple touch-points that will be required for each prospect until you get a meeting with them?
I’m guessing you do have a daily goal, but do you actually do it every day? Just like the “easy pills”, the action doesn’t work unless you implement it every day. So how do you ensure that the bottle of “easy pills” doesn’t sit on the counter, untaken?
If you commit to a goal for each day, and if you simply focus on achieving that goal today, (where each new day is today), I can guarantee that you will see huge results in your sales.
I just finished reading a book entitled The Consistency Chain, by George Campbell & Jim Packard. The subtitle says it all: An Insanely Simple Plan to Create Daily Victories and Generate Life-Long Success.
The book is a very quick and enjoyable read (and funny – one of the authors is literally a standup comedian), so I highly recommend you pick up a copy for yourself.
In a nutshell, the book explains how to create results with consistent daily action that form a "chain". In the words of the authors, “the power of the Chain is not in any single day’s action. The power is in the consistency of the action, day after day.”
This concept can be applied to any area of your life, and to any area within your sales career, whether it be cold calling, or following up, or scheduling meetings with existing clients.
The key is to identify a single, needle-moving activity and then create a Consistency Chain for that single activity. Find a simple way to track your daily efforts visually, which may be an old-school sticker on a calendar, or moving a colored paperclip from one jar into another as you make each call. Be sure to celebrate and reward yourself when you've established a Consistency Chain for that activity.
If I had to choose between giving you a superpower, and giving you consistency, I would give you the latter. Consistency is what actually creates results.