How Preparation Can Boost Your Sales Game

In sports, teams prepare to face each other. They watch the films and listen to media interviews to see if they can pick up a couple of clues or tendencies that will lead to a victory. In some cases, teams have even been accused of filming their opponent’s practice to see if they can achieve a competitive edge.

Most people are relatively predictable. We’re comfortable with what we know, so we tend to follow patterns. In sales, the goal of a top performer is to uncover those patterns—and use them to their advantage.

If you’re a sports fan, you’ve probably arrived early to a ballpark or venue to enjoy a beverage or something hot off the grill before the game begins. Why not take the same approach in sales?

Start by adopting a weekend ritual. If you make preparation your ritual over the weekend, over time, you can predict within 80% accuracy how your sales calls, conversations, meetings and interactions will begin and end.

Each weekend, think about the conversations you will conduct in the upcoming week. How will they start? What will be said after the pleasantries?

Predicting how the call will start is equivalent to a sprinter getting out of the starting blocks clean. This is knowledge that empowers you to exude confidence and take control of the conversation right out of the gate.

Anticipating the response you will receive is trickier. Whether or not you expect it to be receptive, you need to plan how you’ll keep the conversation going.

Last but not least, how will the meeting end? Roughly 75% of sales conversations end with the customer “futuring” you—they indicate interest, but lack a substantial level of commitment or action to move the relationship forward. Do you have a plan for responding to this type of customer?

Most customers are too busy just trying to get through their day, so they don’t devote full attention to why you’re there—and they make predictable, neutral comments as a result.

If you prepare like an athlete for the big game, you can stay one step ahead of your customer. And if you know what they’ll say at the beginning and the end, you can prepare yourself for a better outcome.

Charles D. Brennan, Jr. is the author of McGraw Hill’s “Take Your Sales to the Next Level” and director of the Brennan Sales Institute, a leading provider of advanced sales training programs.