70. 3 Steps To Crush Your 2021 Sales Goals

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Hey, hey. It is Friday. It is time for Friday Bullpen Sessions. My name is Andy Neary. Each week I deconstruct my journey, my struggles through professional baseball to help unpack yours so you can live a life on purpose. I take the lessons I learned in baseball and help you apply them in business and in life. So if you're ready to join me, grab your glove, grab a ball, get ready to take the mound. And get ready. Bear down to strike out the limiting beliefs in your life. All right, here we go.

Hey, hey. Welcome back to Friday Bullpen Sessions. Today is episode 70. This is going to be a fun episode. We're going to talk routines, plans of action. If you are in sales of any kind, you're a producer, you're going to actually absolutely love this episode. This is for you. You need a clear plan of action today to win more business. Heck, you need routine in life to feel good about what you're doing, feel good about who you are. And that's what we are going to dive into today. Now, before we get there, I want to send out a quick invite. I think we can all admit this is going to be one of the craziest holiday seasons we've ever had. Our habits, our daily rituals, our ability to manage time have all been tested this year, haven't they? And all of a sudden, now we're going to throw the holidays on top of that. We're about ready to partake in virtual Thanksgivings, virtual Christmases, and I think it's gonna leave a lot of you in a struggle. It's gonna leave you feeling unfulfilled. You're gonna feel like you don't have enough time, you're not working on you. So you can be your best for everybody else. And I want to help out and play my part. So if you want to get amped up for the holidays, you want to be your best, the best version of you. As we kick off the holiday season, I want to invite you to join the 10 day holiday challenge. It's going to be 10 days. 10 days of coaching videos, 10 days of content to help you with daily habits, help you with positive mindset, and help you put in the right skills to own your days, own your calendar so they don't own you. If that's you. If you need that right now, gut check, I want you to simply text the word challenge to 414-622-1462. That's all you got to do. Text the word challenge to 414-622-1146, 2. And you will be entered for for the holiday challenge with a chance to earn cash prizes, a chance to earn an episode on this podcast. It's going to be fun, so don't forget to do that right now. All right, let's dive back into this week's episode. All right, I'm excited about this one. This we're going to talk about rituals, having a clear plan of action, routine so that you can win more business today. If you're in sales, you're a producer for an insurance agency, you're a financial advisor, I don't care. You sell washing machines, whatever it is, you need a better plan of action. Now, there are three parts of your sales process that have to have clear plans of action. And here's what's happening. When you don't have that clarity of the routine in each step of the process, all of a sudden your confidence wanes. You don't feel like you're doing the right things. You have a little self doubt and all of a sudden you are winning less business, you have less sales opportunities. You are going into, you know, bouts with self doubt, a lack of confidence. And we know all, we know what happens when that happens, right? You find yourself in this mental dumpster fire and you feel like you don't even know what you're doing. Trust me, I've been there plenty of times in my career selling insurance. Now, what I'm going to do today is actually share with you what my routine, my plan of action looked like as a pitcher. It's the plan of action that I truly believe allowed me to elevate myself at the college level and ultimately give myself the chance to play and pitch in professional baseball. And it actually can help you win today in sales. So we're gonna walk through that process. I'm gonna parlay it into how you can leverage it to grab the attention, win the business you deserve today. So let's dive into this. What the hell do I mean when I talk about how I am going to share my routine, my game plan as a pitcher and how that actually can help you win business and sales? Well, again, remember, here's why you're struggling today. Number one, 2020 has been a really weird year. Can we all just agree on that?

But the problem is, as 2020 has gone on, as we have continued dealing with this pandemic, lockdowns, just a different way of life. You have gotten away from your plan of action, you have gotten away from your routine, and it's impacting you. On a personal note, but it's really impacting you with your business. And I felt the same way when I was pitching, especially when I was at uw. I had a solid plan of action.

Before I took the mound while I was pitching and how I took care of myself after the game was over. And I want to share that with, share that with you right now, because I'm going to teach you how you can leverage that to win business and sales today. So let's talk about that. I spent the majority of my pitching career at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee as a starting pitcher. One thing I loved about the starting role is you had a lot of time to prepare. I'll be honest, it was probably one reason I struggled at the professional level. In the Milwaukee brewers organization, I wasn't a starting pitcher. I was a relief pitcher, middle relief. And often you didn't get much time to prepare. You were thrust into action, and you had to be at your best within minutes. So while I was a starter, especially in later, later on in my junior and senior seasons at uwm, I had a very, very defined plan of action, a very clear routine as I prepared myself to get ready to start a game. Step one was gaining the clarity and the confidence that I was locked in. Let me tell you about that. When I knew I had a starting point roll coming up, you know, it was game day. My routine started about 45 minutes before I even stepped in the bullpen to warm up for the game. What I would do is I would start running pole to pole. So if you can imagine a baseball field, whether our dugout was on the right field side or the left field side, I would just do slow jogs on the warning track from the left field foul pole all the way over to the right field foul pole, back and forth. And I do that for about 10 minutes.

Then I would go and find the foul line and I would run sprints. I wanted to get my legs ready, legs amped up so that they could last the entire game. One thing as a pitcher that you recognize, especially for the pitchers listening out there, if you have a leg problem, you have an arm problem, right? And so making sure your legs were at their best is almost as important as making sure your arm is at its best. So I would run sprints, get my heart rate up, get my body warmed up, and then I would jump rope. Now, that's a very unique ritual for a pitcher. You probably haven't seen many pitchers take to the jump rope before they would start a game on the mound, but I did it was my go to. I would grab my jump rope that I always carried with me in my bag, and I would jump 500 times.

So it was pull to pole for 10 minutes, about five to 10 sprints to warm up my body, get my heart rate going, and then it was 500 jumps with the jump rope. Then I would stretch out my legs, then I would stretch out my arm, and then it was time to start playing catch. I would start in the outfield with the catcher, start, you know, maybe 30, 40ft away, work back to 60, 70ft, 100ft, all the way to about 120ft, playing long toss, literally throwing the ball as hard as I could from 120ft out. Now, after all that was done, we're talking about a half an hour by this point. It was finally time to go in the bullpen, to really get legitimately warmed up to take the mound. And when we got to the bullpen, I had a routine there. It was about five throws in front of the pitcher's mound, five tosses on the pitcher's mound, another five throws behind the pitcher's mound, and then I would step back up to the mound and get myself ready to be accurate to throw strikes and to be ahead of my game that day. All of that took about 45 minutes. But here is the deal. Here's why I did that. Let's quickly review pole to pole. I would run poles for 10 minutes. I would run sprints. I would jump rope. I would stretch both arms and legs, and then I would start playing catch and finally take the bullpen to get ready for the game. All about in roughly 45 minutes. Here's what it did for me. Do I know the science, the research behind why I did what I did? No, not really. But when I would do that, when I would perform that routine from start to finish.

I knew I was locked in mentally. Athletes are very superstitious. I was definitely a superstitious individual. But I knew if I could put that routine in every single game, the date, game day, the day I was starting, I knew I was locked in. That was the confidence I needed to be like, all right, it's go time. So having that clear plan of action to gain the clarity and the confidence that when I was ready to take the mound in the game, I was locked in, dialed in, ready to go. Now, let's parlay that into your business. Right now, you're trying to win business. You're in sales. You're trying to grow. The first step is you gotta gain confidence and clarity. And gain attention. How are you gaining attention of your prospects? If Covid has taught us one thing is we, number one, have to be online today. If you do not have an online presence, you are in sales. I am here to tell you and deliver bad news. You are completely irrelevant. You have to be online today. And by the way, this little piece of online.

Salesmanship is never going away. We're never going fully back to the way it was. We are always going to have some kind of online presence from here moving forward. And so when you think about what that plan of action is, I want you to start giving some thought to what you're doing today. Now, one thing that has blown me away in sales, especially in the insurance industry where I come from, is the training that is given to producers on how to gain that attention today. I would argue the number one way most producers are taught to gain attention of their prospects is to pick up the phone and cold call. Yes, the same strategy we were taught or those in sales were taught in 1975 and 1985 and 1995 and on. Now, I want you to think about this. Now, I'm not sitting here and preaching cold calling is dead. No, cold calling has to be part of the strategy. But I want you to think about as you trying to gain the attention of your prospects and have to gain more attention than your competition.

When you pick up the phone to cold call to gain said attention, here's what you're doing. You are picking up the phone and calling one person at a time who probably has no idea who the hell you are. And you're trying to convince them to trust you to take a meeting.

Now I get it. If you make 25 dials, 100 dials, you're gaining the attention of 25 and 100 people. I get it. But again, think about the exercise, the activity. Every time you pick up the phone, you are trying to get one person, one person to trust you enough to take a meeting. The same holds true for those that are still out there pounding the pavement. I get it. You love to do the face to face, the drop offs. But again, every door you knock on, you're trying to gain the attention of one individual at a time. The beauty of being online today, the beauty of leveraging the tools and technology we have today to gain that attention of your prospects, is you can exponentially gain the eyeballs and the ears of many prospects at one time. So my question to you right now is, do you have a clear plan of action of how you are leveraging social Media because one post can grab the attention of hundreds, if not thousands of your prospects. Are you hosting webinars where you can gain the attention of 10, 20, 50 prospects at one time? Are you actually sending out good emails? Not the crap that you are sharing from some technology platform that is giving you templates? Are you actually taking the time to write emails to, to the 50, the hundred, the 500 people on your email list, grabbing their attention? You see, it is easier today to grab the attention of your prospects, but it's also harder than hell because everybody's doing it. So you have to find a way to stand out. So number one, you must have a clear plan of action to gain the attention of your prospects. Now let's go back to my game day start now. It was game time. Now I'm taking the mound, my 45 minute routine is up, I'm ready to rock and roll. And now it's time to take the mound. And I had to have a game plan there, right? If I wanted to last all nine innings, I had to have a solid game plan. Now there are some foundational routines of my game plan that were true no matter who I was facing, right? I didn't throw overly hard. So number one, I had to be an accurate pitcher. I had to throw strikes, I had to get ahead. That was the name of my game. Number two, I definitely had to keep the batting order off balance. I couldn't blow them away with with gas, with the speed of my fastball, so I had to keep them guessing. I was what you referred to as a pitcher who threw backwards. I like to throw changeups, curveballs, sliders in counts where you thought I would throw a fastball and vice versa. I would throw fastballs and counts. You thought I would throw an off speed pitch, so I had to keep them off balance. But every single team I faced had a little different nuance, right? They had different batters, a different battery batting order. So I had to tweak my game plan every single start based on who I was facing. Take note of that. I had to tweak my game plan every single week. I started based on who I was facing, but there were still foundational aspects of my routine that remain locked in accuracy.

And keeping people off balance. Now, the third part of this strategy while I was in game, game mode, lock in, is I could not continue throwing the same stuff to the leadoff batter every single time he came up to bat. You know, one thing about baseball, right, is a batter typically faces the starting pitcher a minimum of two to Three times, maybe four. And every single time that leadoff hitter came up, I had to have a different approach. I couldn't come at him with the same stuff every single time. I couldn't have the same game plan to face him in the seventh inning as I had back in the first inning. Because if I did that, I became very, very predictable. And if you look at batting averages of hitters facing the same pitcher over the length of 5, 6, 7 innings, it goes up over time because now they're getting used to that pitcher. They're used to seeing the same stuff. And if that pitcher doesn't change up the game plan once in a while, he becomes very ineffective. Now, my whole objective pitching was to earn the victory. So now let's throw that back over to your business. How are you? What is your plan of action to earn the business of those prospects you have now gained the attention of? That's step two. Step one, what are you doing? What is your plan of action to gain attention? Number two, what is your plan of action to earn their business? Every time you get a new prospects, do you feel like you're recreating the wheel? See, if I took the mound every single game trying to recreate the wheel, I was screwed. So what is your foundational plan of action, your process that when a prospect comes into the pipeline, you know exactly what you're going to take with step one, step two, step three. Now, just like I had to tweak my game plan to the team I was facing, because not every team's the same, you have to do the same with your prospects. You have to tweak the message. They may have different goals, different challenges, a different destination they want to achieve. You can't have one goal, one challenge, and one destination you solve and you create. You have to tweak your process, your message a little bit based on who the prospect is, just like I had to do with depending on the team I had to face. And third, you have to constantly keep innovating that process. Just like I had to innovate my strategy to face the leadoff batter in the seventh inning because it couldn't look exactly like it did in the first, you have to do the same over time. Whatever this process is by which you take an unhappy prospect to a happy client, you have to keep innovating.

So my message is this, once you gain the attention of those prospects and they're now in the pipeline, what is your process for clearly walking them through the steps, the phases that you're going to take to get them to that happy client who has arrived at their destination. You have to have clarity. Name that process, brand that process, because that becomes what you use to reach out to prospects with, to see if they are a fit for that process. So step one, how are you gaining the attention of your prospects? You have to have a plan of action, and just cold calling is not going to be enough. Number two, when they become a prospect, they're in the pipeline. You've met with them. What is that process you have clearly defined to your team and to them, to show them how they're going to become a happy client, how they're going to come arrive at their destination. Now, step three. After my game was over, win or lose, I had to keep my body in shape, my arm rested. You see, a starting pitcher has an entire weekly routine that nobody sees after they've made a start again. Whether you won the game, you lost the game, you had a great game, or you sucked, you had to have a routine. Number one, you had to ice the arm after the game was over, right? You had to make sure you were revitalizing the arm, whether you're a righty or lefty. You had to get the lactic acid out of your arm. You had to get the lactic acid out of your legs. So my routine was very simple. The day after a game, a start, I went for a long run. I had to get that lactose, that.

Lactic acid out of my body.

Right after the start, I had to ice my arm. And then as the week progresses, I give my arm about a day or two of rest after a start, then I need to start playing catch again, right? I've got to get that arm back in shape again. And sometime between one start to the next, I had to have a bullpen session with my coach, right? I have to take to the bullpen to work on, maybe my mechanics, work on a new pitch, work on just throwing dang strikes and getting ahead in the count. But you have to have a routine as a starting pitcher between each start to make sure you're maintaining your body and maintaining your mental focus for the next start. Now, in your business, you don't need to maybe maintain your body and your mental approach, although I would argue you do. But when you finally get the chance to earn the business of a prospect, my question to you is, what is your plan of action to keep them a happy client? So many spend so much time trying to win the business, recreating the wheel every single time. But when you get that win, you have no plan of action to actually keep that client happy for a long, long period of time. So my challenge to you is this. When you finally win the business, we all know the hard work starts when you finally win the business. Do you have a clear annual plan of action for your new client to ensure that they remain a happy client year after year after year?

So that's my advice to you today. I know that was a little far fetched. You're going, andy, how in the hell did your routine as a starting pitcher, how does that impact my sales profession, my sales career? Very simple to summarize. What I had to do every single day, day as a starting pitcher is number one on game day, I had to be prepared. I had to have a clear plan of action to gain the clarity and the confidence to know I am locked in for that start. Number two. So just like that, number two, I had to earn the win. I had to have a game plan. Going into the game, when I'm on the mound, I had to attack each team slightly from a different perspective, but I had to have those foundational, those foundational routines, that accuracy, that keeping the batters off balance. And I had to constantly innovate my approach when I'm facing batters 2, 3, 4 times in one game. And then when that game was over, whether I won or lost, I had to spend the next week maintaining my body, getting my arm back in shape and making sure I had my bullpen session. So I gained that mental and that physical clarity to be ready for the next start. So just like that, in your sales career right now, in your role as a producer, number one, you have to have absolute clarity, clarity that you have a plan of action to gain the attention of your prospects. Number two, now they become a prospect, you've been met with them. You have to have a clear plan of action that takes them from an unhappy prospect to a happy client. You have to define each step along the way. And no, you slightly have to tweak between based on each different prospect out there because they have different goals, different strengths, different weaknesses. And you have to be constantly innovating that process. And then step three, work when they become a client, when they give you the yes, you've got to have a plan of action on an annual basis to keep them happy for a long, long time. I know that's not rocket science, but so many right now are lacking one, two, or all three of those. And they're spending their time picking up the phone, frustrated, no one's answering. They have no plan of action when somebody actually becomes a prospect so they feel like they're recreating the wheel every single time. And then when they become a client because they don't have a defined annual game plan for that client, unfortunately, the clients remain a client for a year, maybe two, and they're gone. So that's my advice for you today. Whether you're a starting pitcher out there, I hope that helped you become a better, more effective pitcher on the mound. Or if you are a producer in a sales role right now, you got to master all three, gain the attention, earn the business and keep them happy. You do that, you have a clear plan of action for each step of that process, you're going to have a long, long, successful sales career. So I hope that helps. And you know, last but certainly not least, when clarity and confidence collide, action happens. Go make it happen today.

Hey, thank you for taking the time to listen to this Friday Bullpen session. If you are enjoying these episodes, please do me a favor, go over to Apple, subscribe, give it a five star rating. And if you know of anybody in your life, whether it's in your family, personal life, your friends, business colleagues that you think would find benefit in listening to these episodes as well, do me a favor, please share the Bullpen sessions with them. I'd be extremely grateful if you did and again, go out and make it happen today. Thank you.