Episode 8: How to Improve your Sales Performance by Leveraging the Learning of Professional Athletes

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management. And to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits. Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams. Today we have a very special guest, Juan Sanchez, who is the founder and head coach of Primely. Primely is a business that's been around for a few years now and we've done some work with them in the past and I love their approach to sales teams and business in general. For Primely, mental fitness and sales performance go hand in hand together. They're mutually inclusive, one drives the other. And their job is to help educate sales leaders on how they can embrace positive psychology and wellbeing practices into their daily lives. Right. Leading to a healthier and hopefully more successful life. Prior to Primely, Juan was an equity partner at a very successful renewables business. And what I really like about Juan is that he carried the bag. He managed sales teams, he was a BDM for 12 to 15 years. And for me that brings exceptional credibility to to a subject matter expert topic like mental fitness. So he's able to combine the theory of mental fitness with some real practical applications from his time as a sales manager. Primarily the business operates across Latin America, the Americas and in Australia. And I really like how Juan himself actually also volunteers for some not for profit organizations, but particularly one called Beyond Blue, which is all about suicide prevention. So he's a crisis support worker there and has seen the real downside of mental health and when you don't get it right through to some real pl positive examples of excellent mental health. So I love that about Juan and what he does. So today's topic and welcome Juan, I should say before we get started. Nice to have you here.

Thank you, Benjamin. Pleasure to be here for the first time.

Not many people call me Benjamin, really just my mother when I'm in trouble, but we'll let that one slide. So today, Juan, we're going to focus in the first of a Three part series. So we're looking at three podcasts with Juan. Today's all about how to improve your sales performance or your team's sales performance by leveraging the learnings of professional athletes. And I love this as a topic because we as a society, no different, whether you're in the US or the Europe or Asia Pacific, we often look at athletes as an aspirational person or team for who we can look up to. So I love that we're going to talk about how can we take some of their disciplines and embed them into our performance as sales teams. So we might jump straight into it, actually, if that's okay, Juan, and I'm going to hit you with a few questions and let's see where we land today. But I think the really important part to start here is can you please help us understand what exactly do you mean by the term mental fitness?

Absolutely, and it's a great point. To start as a whole, there's no correct definition for mental fitness. It's a term that's been used relatively, if not for a very long period of time. But if you look up the term fitness or fit in a dictionary, they define it as the ability to be able to perform, to be in good shape physically. Now, the term mental fitness aims to use that term to make people think of their minds in a very similar way to what they think about their body. So to be physically fit means that you're happy with your appearance, that your muscles are in good condition to be able to perform at whatever sport is it that you do. The same thing applies for mental fitness. To be in the right state of mind and to have the mental stamina and strength to be present in the moment and to make rational and correct decisions, regardless of any uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, sensations on the environment. There is, in other words, is the ability for your mind to make the right decisions at the appropriate time.

I really like that last part that you said there. So for us salespeople, sales leaders, this is what I'm hearing from you. We have within our control the ability to train our minds to work under pressure, just like athletes do on game day or race day. We have the ability to be able to influence our performance under pressure 100%.

That I probably talk to the people that I work with about the red brain and blue brain model. So if we go back in time when we were people living in caves, our red brain or our survival instinct kicked in when we saw an animal sort of knock on our door to try to sort of scare us in that specific point in time, our brain goes into a fight or flight mode and makes not rational decisions, but just makes you literally flee or run. We have the ability now, through science and positive psychology and mental fitness exercises to be able to switch off that red brain and to go into what we call the blue brain, which is the more rational, cognitive driven part of our brains to make sure that we are making the right decisions and saying the right things when it matters the most. Especially when we're facing customers on our day to day jobs.

Okay, so hearing red brain, caveman, reactionary. Very much about being in the moment without necessarily any practice or training. Right. We look at cavemen as generally more primitive forms in our evolution of the human species. I love that bit about the blue brain saying that as athletes and salespeople, we should be training ourselves to work under pressure. Cool. Really nice. So, Longbow sometimes, but perhaps as long as you think automatically. Salespeople. What do we have in common with professional athletes?

Lots, actually. But I'd probably like to spend some time on five key points. The first one is very easy to see. Obviously both professions are professional careers. Professional athletes get paid to compete in whatever sport they do. Same are salespeople. They're professionally, in most cases, highly rewarded business people. Secondly, and if we take tennis as an example, both professions are an individual sport or activity. So most of the time you're just relying on yourself when you're on game day or race day. Same thing applies when you're trying to sell something to someone. Third point is that competition is extremely fierce in both professional sports and the sales arena. There's always lots of players trying to get people's business on a day to day basis. The same thing applies for sports. But the one thing that I like to spend a bit more time, it's on a concept that as a young tennis player that I was in my childhood that my coach used to stress on me. And what's the point of the fact that what happens or what you do off court and has an even greater effect on what you do on court? So if we take that into the sales profession, what we do away from our work impacts significantly our performance during our work time. So I'm mentioning that because the key thing that we'll probably be speaking about in today's podcast is all around preparation. So what steps or what things are we doing away from our workplace that will shape the way we are conducting our day to day activities when we're at work trying to sell something to whatever customers we're trying to approach.

I like that. So what we're saying here is that aside from the fact that salespeople and professional athletes are competitive beasts, no doubt about it, we are certainly some of the most competitive people on this planet, is that prior proper preparation prevents pretty poor performance. Or the seven P's that I talk about pretty regularly for those that I work with is absolutely critical in a sales role, just as it is when you're a professional athlete. So can we talk about in a little bit more detail, what are the learnings or the findings that you get from professional athletes that we as salespeople might be able to leverage to give us more sustainable high performance?

There's plenty, but we'll probably sort of stick to three in the time being. The first one is having a wholesome approach towards performance and recognizing the need for balance in our lives. I think if we go back in time, probably to the mid-1900s, athletes were all about just hitting the gym or doing the physical activity that they required and there was nothing else included in their training programs. If we fast forward to today to 2023, we see most of athletes having obviously your trainer in terms of the physical sport that they do or their coach. We also have nutritionists, we also have psychologists working with them. We also, we also have physios, et cetera, et cetera. So in a nutshell is having a much broader look at what performance means and how you can achieve that. And as a starter is being able to recognize the need of balance between body and mind. That's the first thing. Secondly is also acknowledging what people's well being is all about. And we'll be referring to a model called the wheel of life. But in a nutshell is being able to recognize the six key components for anyone's well being, which is finances, spirit, body, mind, relationships and emotions. And last but not least is recognizing the fact that leading an unbalanced or unmentally fit way of life can significantly increase the risk of burnout and underperformance in our sales careers.

So great. So Juan, so what I'm hearing is that balance is really important in really ensuring we achieve sustainable high performance. Nobody likes the salespeople that come in. They have a brilliant month. You don't see them again for three months and then they again in there in the door. And they're living on that roller coaster of life, of the yin and yang, of poor and amazing sales month. So perhaps, and as we go through this series of podcasts, certainly episodes two and three, we'll have a look a Little bit further into the wheel of life and how we can actually practically apply some of the techniques that athletes use into our lives as salespeople. Something that always fascinates me is that salespeople, we're judged heavily on our results. And I think it's very similar to athletes. Doesn't matter whether you are the LA Kings who are having a great season in the ice hockey at the moment. I'm a bit of an ice hockey fan, so going really well, or you're individuals such as LeBron James or Tom Brady won more playoffs than just about any other team in the league, just himself as a person. These people or teams, they are judged by their wins, by their successes. Do you think this is a good approach to judge an individual's results? And if it is, how can we judge that fairly to really drive their mental fitness?

That's a great point. I remember back in my previous roles where we used to joke that you're only as good as your last sales month. Same thing applies for sports. You're only as good as your last season or your last tournament.

And.

And yes, we are rated and we're judged on the tournaments or the wins that we get across the board. But I think the best athletes or the best salespeople as a whole are those that are consistent in their performance, whether they might not win every tournament, every single time that they play one, because that's pretty much physically impossible to do, right? But that they make the final rounds over and over and over again. So it's achieving that consistency, which I think is the hardest because one thing is becoming the number one. But it's a much harder thing to remain number one for a long period of time. So my question to everyone there would be, is it sustainable in the long term? Are you doing the right things to be able to maintain that consistency across the 12 months of the year? And I think the most successful salespeople are those that have deals coming in constantly every month to make sure that they have a balanced and less sort of stressful months.

It's a pretty powerful way to look at sales performance. So for me personally, I embrace accountability. I love celebrating wins. But really importantly is when we don't have a win, we look at it as an opportunity to learn rather than a time to criticize. For me, that builds consistency. And what I'm hearing is that consistency and performance for the teams that you work with is something that's actually valued more than hitting really high peaks. So getting to the top, but falling back quickly. And I think In a sales organization that is very, very relevant. So how do we do that? How do we hit consistency? Is it all about our abilities? Is it all about our training programs? Is it all about some type of pre competition routine? Right. Is there something that we could take, take from athletes that they do really well that can help us consistently outperform?

Well, it's a combination of all those that you've previously mentioned. Ben is having obviously the right preparation program in place to make sure that you're doing everything you possibly can when you are presenting that proposal, when you're trying to close that deal. So it's all about creating that habit or that routine that makes us feel as comfortable as possible whenever we are about to either start performing as athletes or start our presentation or sales sort of closing time. Right at the end of the day, repetition triggers muscle memory and we want to make sure that we're repeating over and over again our same routine. So it actually makes us feel like we've been through those situations before. We see that in sports very, very usually when, for example, LeBron James steps into a basketball court or wearing his headphones and listening to the same songs that he uses to play. We saw Michael Phelps, for example, taking having the same routine before the Olympics, having a break at certain time, eating certain foods, going as well into the pool with his headphones, listening to music. He's creating those pre comp routine or that pre meeting routine that will make you perform at your best.

Yeah. And that's very easy to translate into the sales world. What are some of the businesses that you work with, some of the sales teams that you work with? Are there two or three pre meeting routines that you see really commonly being employed across your customers?

Most of the customers that I work with have three clear things in mind. Number one is to clear the zone or to have a clear agenda as to what they want to achieve out of that meeting. Secondly is practicing some mindfulness and meditation exercises, people, before the meeting itself. Science has proven that meditation and mindfulness creates new neural pathways and that gives us the ability to mentally perform better whenever we're under stressful situations. And thirdly, which I think is the most important, is making sure that you've done all the research possible prior to meeting the person that you're having that conversation with.

So we're getting rid of distractions, we're focusing on what we need to do and, and we're making sure that we've done our homework on our customers. Sounds pretty simple. If we can get our sales teams globally to do that, we're gonna have some seriously great performances coming because I certainly know many of the businesses I work with haven't been able to really embed that, so love it, Juan. And we might talk about that a little bit further as we go through our podcast series. Okay, so to finish off today for me, I look at the sales environment as one that's very much about pressure. Right. I think we're no different to athletes in that we need to perform on the day. We're certainly judged differently to other functions in my experience, through businesses, operations, delivery, customer care, even finance, marketing, legal, these functions generally don't have that level of pressure to perform in the moment to such high levels. So how can we as salespeople, and perhaps taking from the performance of athletes, how can we deal better with the daily stress and pressure that comes with our jobs?

So first thing is understanding what stress is.

Right.

And stress is the natural reaction of the body towards a future or towards an unknown event. So regardless the situation that we're going through, any future situations will inherently trigger that stress reaction in our body. So first thing is to understand what stress is, and the secondly is understand what to do about it. Now, we've all felt our productivity sometimes or most of the times improve whenever we're under a small amount of stress. Yeah, whenever we have a deadline, we work a bit harder towards it, otherwise we tend to procrastinate. But I feel that the best practices out of the professional sport that we can bring to the sales field is to make sure that you've done everything you physically can or anything that's physically possible in terms of preparation prior to that meeting or to a presentation that you have. So it's all about how you're preparing yourself and having an adequate pre meeting or pre competition routine to ensure that you're able to perform at optimum levels.

That really comes down to things like having a great process. So having a really clear process that your team follow, having a team that works together to support each other to prepare for these stressful moments. Because I totally agree with you, when you see teams under a little bit of pressure, they actually perform really well. But if you go past that mark of what's regarded as moderate pressure, things can start to crumble. So really today, Juan, what we've been talking about is that mental fitness is a muscle in your body that you can train. But really, we're very similar to professional athletes in that we work in high pressure environments. How we perform on the field or in front of customers. For salespeople is heavily influenced by not only our mental fitness, but also what we do outside of that moment. So not just in our day to day professional lives, but also how we live our lives outside of those moments. But really that a lot of the performance improvements we make can come down to preparation, which is so readily talked about but often I think overlooked by the very busy modern life. In the next series, what we might actually talk about is how we can strengthen our mental fitness to improve our sales performance or to optimize our sales performance. So fantastic. Thank you. Really like what you've gone through today. For those that want to hear a little bit more about you, as I've said, you operate through Latin America, North America and Australia. What's the best way that people can get in touch with you?

Yeah, you can visit our website, it's primelead.com au that is P R I ME L Y.com au or you can also visit our LinkedIn page. Looking up Primely as an organization.

Fantastic. Thank you, Juan. Well, we look forward to seeing you again for another podcast in the coming weeks. So in the coming weeks we'll run that second podcast in the series of mental fitness that we're looking at. But I think for today we'll finish up. That's fantastic. Some great stuff to think about, team. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep thinking in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales teams.