The Fine Line Between Developing Your Sales Skills and Just Doing Your Job

Hey, guys, what's up? Matt and James here today. No taste sweat, unfortunately.

Unfortunately. Oh, Ryan.

It'S a. I've got a haircut, too. Those of you who care, I do follow.

Yeah.

Okay. So today is going to be about the fine line and the balance for salespeople and even just, I guess, business owners in general between, like, the development of getting better at your job and just doing the job. So cue the intro.

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Put that coffee down.

I guess, like, how many hours to put into learning versus how many hours to put in dialing.

Right?

That's the argument.

Yeah. So one of the. One of the common faults that I see if I look at a salesperson's calendar is that they'll have, like, they actually don't give themselves enough time on their diary to actually achieve the financial goal they want. Let's say they wanted to make. I've done this before. 20,000 bucks. Thousand dollars a sale. 20 sales. Okay. A month.

Okay.

Let's say you're a 50% close rate guy.

All right?

Therefore, you need 40 calls to shop. That's 40 hours.

Right.

Then to get 40 calls to shop, you probably need 60 calls booked that. 60 hours. Okay. And then you've got the triages or whatever like that.

Right.

So you need that time in your diary during the times that people are definitely going to show up.

Right.

And then if you've got triages on top of that, in order to book that many, you're probably going to need to have like a third as much time dedicated towards triage as to get that. So you're getting close to kind of like redlining on the diary meter. And then they'll have an hour booked out. James. For morning routine. They'll have an hour and a half gym. Hour and a half gym.

Two hours study time.

Two hours study time. I have role play for four hours of meditation.

Yep.

Or whatever. Might even have 26, 27 hours a day worth of just good vibes. So, like, their diaries make no sense. And, like, instead of, like putting that time aside in the diary, marking it as free.

Yeah. Right.

Which means that, like, Google Calendar can be booked over it if a sales call, heaven forbid, someone who wanted you could actually make money off, wanted to get booked in. Then, like, they don't have enough time. Like, I literally have had a look at people's diaries and they've had like, they've had like nine hours a week available for sales when they're a full time sales guy.

Yeah.

Like, this makes no sense in the planet. Like, doing sales is the best way to develop.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you need like a level to get onto those sales calls of development first. It's funny, right? Because there needs to be this, like a sweet spot of actually doing the work and learning. Because you can watch the course 10 times in a row and fall into the trap that I'm doing everything right to get better. Like, I've watched the course 20 times. I've, you know, read the notes, I've read all these books.

Have you spoken to anyone?

Yeah.

But you haven't practiced it, right?

Or.

And if you do role play, you're role playing with people who are at or below your level. Yes. You're not role playing people who are better than you. The only way you're going to get access to them is one, if you pay them, or two, if you go into a course environment where there are people who are better than you. Because, like, if I'm a better sales guy than you are, which I hate to break into, I am. What if Jeremy's watching and, like. No, I'm just kidding. Jeremy Savage.

That's a fight.

Hey, all right.

Challenge.

Nah, he's a savage, bro. He's a savage. Then, then I would, I would, I would. Like, why would I role play with you? There's no benefit to me.

Yeah, right.

You're just taking time out of my diary. And I'm a farmer guy who wants to make a lot of money. Like, I was asked to do content for one of the businesses that I was selling for ages ago, and I was like, sweet, man. Will you pay me $2,000 a sale? It takes me an hour to do a sale. I have a, like an 80% close rate. So therefore, like, from 10 hours, I would make eight sales, which means that, like, in 10 hours, I would make $16,000. You want me to do five hours of content? I have to charge you at least five grand. Yeah, like there's no other way.

Well, I'm not paying for that content.

So why would I? You don't get the content. Like, like, why would I train your staff? Why would I train your guys? Like, when I'm a commission, like, there's no benefit to Me, especially when you, the business owner, ask me, the sales guy, to train the other sales guys on the team, that noise.

To get better, to compete with me.

So, so, so you can diversify your risk and put lead flow into people that you can probably convince to take less money because they're not as good. That's a great idea for me. I'm going to go ahead and do that for sure. And for those of you who are like, oh, what about the team? It's like, well, if I'm a bunch of commission only sales reps, unless you've done a very, very good job as a business owner of unifying that team, there is no benefit. What I do and what we do is we do group cash collection bonuses that's dispersed evenly throughout the team, not performance based. So that everyone works together and they work as a team to want to kind of build everything up. Right. So that's one of the ways that we do that. But like in terms of going back to that development, right. Like people are just putting too much time. So with, like, like, like with the role plays, role playing is a very, very important component of getting better at sales. There's no doubt about it. But if you're role playing with people who are nowhere near as good as you, or if you're role playing with people who are like lesser than you or even equal to you, but they're not giving you feedback, feedback, but they're also not testing you, like, that's why when I run roleplay sessions, like I make them really difficult, I make them role play really difficult prospects, really difficult objections outside of the box kind of stuff. Because like what you want to do is you want to have a great understanding of the process.

I also think role plays are a waste of time. The majority of the time. And I know that sounds controversial, but for good reason, right? And the reason being is most people don't go into that role play with a proper intention to get better at something. And, and with someone giving them the required feedback for the specific thing they want to get better. So like what I do now is I teach our guys after they do their call reviews and, or they've gotten feedback from someone that's better than them that can point out one specific thing, we get them to find like the lowest hanging fruit that they need to work on.

Right?

That could be objection. Handling could be tonality, it could be structure, it could be whatever. Let's say if it's structure, for instance, the, the tool that they would need to get better is they need better structure, they get might get more benefit from doing a different activity that's going to teach them structure rather than role playing. Then when that gets to a level where they've now got that structure down pat, you would want to go into a role play with someone listening specifically for the structural clues. Right. To say, oh, you did this wrong. You did this right. Solely listening for structure and giving only feedback for that so that they get tangible advice to see whether or not the work they did leading into that role play was actually beneficial.

Yeah.

Right. Then you're targeting one specific thing. And then we make our guys spend 70% of that time. Well, 70% of that time assigned to development, developing that one specific skill that's the lowest hanging fruit. If you identify that, you know that spending your time on that is going to give you the biggest results in your commission check. So why spend the time working on objection handling if you're already good at it, you know, and there's no point objection handling if you can't get to an objection in the first place because you've already lost the sale.

Yeah.

So if you can spend the majority of your time fixing the thing that's going to give you the biggest results, focus on that. But then I let the guy spend the remaining 30% of that development time, which could be an hour a day, could be two hours a day, whatever that is. And I think it should be done after all your calls. It shouldn't be put in the middle of the day, should be put at the end of the day or before you start.

Yeah. Right.

With that additional 30% of the time, it's just for general advice mostly because if people focus on one thing and one thing only, they don't feel that they're making overall progress. So you give them a small amount of time to work on whatever they want to work on, and it feels like they're ticking 10 different boxes when in reality they're getting significantly better results in one thing that's going to get them the biggest challenge. Change in circumstances. Then once they mastered that, you pick another thing or the next thing that's going to give them the biggest result. Focus on that only.

Yeah.

So you're always trying to optimize the. The weakest performing metric.

100%.

Right.

Same as when we look at fonts.

Yeah.

When we look at marketing. And so for those of you who don't know, whenever we take on a done for you client, like, we basically end up not running the marketing because it's not what we do. But we have to audit the marketing on a regular basis to make sure that there's a clear and concise transition from sales process, marketing process to sales process. That handover is super important. And then from there like we got to make sure that there's no like really, really obvious triggers that are going to stop people from like fulfilling their way through the funnel or going to cause like issues in the sales process. One of the biggest things that we find is that a lot of sales and marketing divisions, they don't really talk and so they. There's no like, there's no plan. Essentially it's like, let's just generate a bunch of leads and then sell them. And like. Well, there's a lot of different ways to market and a lot of different ways to have a sales process. Those two things have to marry up and they have to be. There has to be a congruence across the whole thing. Whether it's qualification, de Qualification anyway, there has to be kind of an inverse relationship with the two. But like, so we're always working on performance, the lowest hanging metrics. So like if you're a sales guy, like the easiest thing that you can get good at is. Objection handling.

Right.

Yeah. So now objection handling is your lowest hanging fruit. But it's not the, it's the thing that people focus on the most over the longest period of. Of time, which is incorrect. You want to focus on it the most at the beginning and then get good enough to where it doesn't really matter how good you are at objection handling towards the end because you're just good enough to not really get that many.

Yeah.

Now having the skill set is important the next thing. So once you are good enough at. Objection handling to where like you can handle objections especially like the logistical one. Even if you're not that good at handling like the more fear based ones, but you can just handle simple logistical concerns.

Yeah.

Once you're at that level then like you're gonna, you're gonna start to make a lot more sales just straight away. The second thing you wanna work on is like the overall structure and like the, the, the phases of your call. So you have a really good understanding of what journey you're taking someone through. Cause if you don't know that, then you don't know where you are in the cycle. You don't have a plan. Essentially a sales call is happening to you instead of you doing one.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, exactly. Which, which is what I see a lot of the time. Like if I review calls from like newer guys I'm like, okay, like I can identify the person has some sales chops, but they have no process.

Right.

And it's like, okay, cool, if we just fix this guy's process, then all of a sudden he's going to get a lot more sales. So like, the first thing I'll go is like, okay, let's work on objection handling. That's a really easy thing. We have a objection handling Matrix, which I think is one of the best resources resources out there in terms of sales. So if you go to our website, salesmeniper.net free resources objection handling Matrix, you can go through all that. It'll help you tremendously with the flow charts and the scripts, in depth breakdowns of exactly how to handle different objections.

Right?

Then we go to the process. Now, if you want help on the process, we have a free mini course which is the NE PQ101. I think if you go into any of our Facebook groups, whether it be sales revolution or closing code, you'll be able to get links, links to the free course. We'll actually put it in the description below. Totally free course. It's about 10, I think it's about maybe 20 videos taking through sales process and all this kind of stuff. Right. So you can kind of break that down and have a good meaning of that. Once you have that, then it becomes more nuanced around tonality and like maybe some conviction and all kinds of other stuff like that. These like little X factors that make you a lot better at sales. And then there's like a culmination point where it's like this grind and it kind of your. Your income and your commission start to increase significantly.

Right.

So those are kind of like the areas in which we would address people, you know, in the times that we would address them essentially.

Yeah.

In terms of like actual timings on what you should spend on things. I kind of work off the. For every one hour of like study you do, and that could be course material, reading books, you should be doing four hours of practice, right? If you look at professional athletes, they don't watch 4 hours of video on the opposition team and theory on how to play basketball, they get on the court for two, three hours and then watch half an hour worth of video.

Right.

It doesn't make sense. For every hour of like actual study development you put in, you want four hours of practice and then another half an hour to an hour depending on the situation of practical study. And what that would mean is like say an hour of study could be watching two Modules in npq.

Right.

Then you would want an equal amount of time of that of dedicated, I guess active study, which would be like say tonality. You learn how to. You watch an hour on tonality teaching you how to say things. You want to get in front of the mirror and do some active study, which is like practicing. For an example. I would like a coffee. I would like a coffee. Just checking how that tonality actually sounds.

Right.

And practicing that actively so that you kind of get that when you do your real practice, which is sales calls.

Yeah.

So you know, four hours of actual just watching videos is nowhere near as productive as a couple of hours.

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Make sure you follow it up with the sales call.

Yeah.

And if you do like this kind of content, make sure you comment down below. And if you're still watching this comment. Flamingo.

Flamingo.

Yeah, it's big.

Big old loop, right?

Yeah.

I imagine I've never seen a flamingo.

Imagine.

Imagine that. Big and big.

Yeah.

But if you are watching this far, you'll definitely comment that. Cuz it's a weird thing. It's actually a memory palace trick.

Memory fellas trick. And on that. Thank you guys. Have a good day.

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