[Skills] 7 Sales Skills to Close More New Deals

Prospecting is part of your job. Your job is to go out and help your customers. So you need to flip your mindset from thinking that you're annoying people to how you're actually going to be able to help them. And you are interrupting them in order to help them. We've got a slightly different episode for you all here today. Today it's going to be a solo ones. You're just going to be hearing from me, but this is actually a YouTube video that I just released. So you can either listen to it here on the podcast or you can jump on over to YouTube and watch the video there. There are some visuals that we will be showing, but you can also just listen to it here on the podcast if you'd prefer. And so with that, we'll go ahead and jump in. This is about the seven sales skills that you need to close more deals. I'm really excited to share this video with all of you here. It's focused on the seven sales skills that you need to close more new deals. And it's not your typical fads that you might see on LinkedIn that get thrown around everywhere. These are the core fundamental skills that you need to sell in any economic environment. And so if you're able to master these skills right now, today, when times are difficult, it's going to set you up for massive success later when the boom times come. And so we really want to focus on these core seven skills. And if you focus on these, you will be more successful at driving new deals into your pipeline and closing these opportunities. So let's dive right in. So These are the seven skills that you need. 1. You have to prioritize your growable accounts. Not every account is the same. You need to focus on your growable ones. You need to have magnetic messaging that attracts your ideal customers and repels the ones that you don't want. You need to know your sales math. Sales is a numbers game, but you need to know what the right numbers are that you're working with. You need to commit to prospecting if you are going to drive new business. You need to commit daily to going out there and prospecting and you need to actually do it. You have to execute great discovery calls. This is not your show up and throw up or your old pain and pitch. You have to show up, do deep discovery, understand your prospect's challenges and how you can align your solution to solve those business challenges that they have. You then have to drive those deals to close. And so this is about multi threading, working with multiple stakeholders Building a business case, overcoming indecision, dealing with legal and procurement issues. And lastly, you have to own your calendar. Too often sales reps get caught up in the non selling activities. You have to own your calendar, block the time, delegate the things that aren't important, that aren't driving your new business opportunities. Before we dive into the video and go into these skills in more depth, we're going to define what new deals are. So new deals are any form of new business from net new or existing customers. And so what this means is it could be an existing customer, but this is new business coming from them. This isn't renewals, this isn't run rate business. This isn't stuff that you can just expect to come in on a regular basis. This is proactively going out and identifying new opportunities, cross sells, new products, new accounts, breaking into them, new departments, all about new business and actually growing your territory. What we're not talking about here is how to just like manage a baseline of business. This is about how do you proactively go and build new business opportunities. The first skill that we're going to dive into is how to prioritize your growable accounts. So in each one of these skills, we're going to start off with the mistakes that we see and then we're going to dive into how do you actually improve that skill and what do you need to focus on? So some of the mistakes that we see is you spend too much time with your best customers and not enough time on your growable customers. Most people just pull a list of all the accounts in their territory. Hey, these are the accounts that I'm going after. They don't have a written and prioritized list of key accounts. They don't have a defined strategy for how they're going to break into those accounts. So these are the typical challenges and mistakes that we see. But it's mostly about the time that you're spending on the right accounts. When I talk about growable accounts, these are the accounts that have the biggest opportunity to grow, not the accounts that are your best. Your best accounts are the ones that are really easy to work with and give you a lot of money on a regular basis. And those are your best accounts. It's great to keep those and nurture them and you need to make them happy. However, that's not how you're going to grow your territory because there's not that much room to grow within those accounts. You prioritize those growable accounts where you have to go in, have that hard conversation with that customer that you don't really like, maybe that doesn't really like you that much. You have to do that. You have to step out of your comfort zone because that's how you're going to actually grow these accounts. That's how you grow your territory. So by creating this list and targeting these growable accounts, that's what you're going to really focus on. And so to do this, create a target account list, most people that are listening here probably have a, you know, a set of book of business that they have of existing accounts and then also new accounts that they have to go after. You know, if you're in either of those buckets, you might only be selling to new accounts. It's a lot rarer, I think, for most of us. Or you may only be servicing existing accounts. Either way, make sure that you tier out your account list or you say, hey, I have my growable existing accounts. These are the ones I'm really, really going to go after, that I'm going to focus on. And then you have your NET New Tier 1 accounts. These are your best new accounts that you want to go after. And then you have your tier 2 accounts. These are the ones that are brand new that you're not in, but maybe they're not the ideal fit. And so these are ones that are going to, you know, be slightly deprioritized over the tier one accounts you're going to focus on. So create a written down list of this. So if anybody asks you what accounts are you working on growing, just show them the list. You want to come back to this list all the time because that's what you're going to be working on. You also then need to come up with a territory plan. The territory plan is like how you're actually going to go about growing your territory. And so you set your goals, which are what are the targets that you need to hit. Your strategy is how will you hit them? This includes how are you going to prioritize your accounts, what actions are you specifically going to take? And this might be different seminars, prospecting efforts, meetings that you're going to try and book with specific people, right? Those are the actions that you're going to take to execute your strategy. And then you also want to list out the obstacles so what might get in your way. List these out because then you can proactively go and solve these. If you don't think about what obstacles you might face, you're going to hit these roadblocks and it's going to stifle your momentum. So write down what obstacles that you might face, work with your manager or yourself and just go in and solve these particular obstacles right now and get them out of the way. And then lastly, I think this is a really important one and a lot of people overlook it. But how are you going to develop yourself personally? How are you going to up level your skills as a sales rep? It's all part of your plan. And these five different things have to be a part of your territory plan of your strategy as a rep. If you want to be successful at driving new business, the second skill you have to master is you have to create magnetic messaging. So what is magnetic messaging? Magnetic messaging is a sales story that's designed to attract and engage your ideal customers, specifically attracting your ideal customers and also repelling the customers that aren't a great fit for your product or service. Magnetic messaging is all about your customer. It's all about them. It's polarizing, right? It's about attracting and repelling. It's differentiated talks about your differentiated capabilities, it feeds on their emotions that they have, it tells a story, it's data backed and it's told with conviction. So what do we see as a problem with most messaging today is that, you know, each person typically has a different sales message that they use. So but if you went to every single rep on your sales team and said tell me about what you do, you'd probably get different answers from everyone. And so we need to create these standardized sets of stories that can be practiced and told with conviction. Most of the time the response is going to be all about you. Talk about your capabilities, your features, your benefits, just the facts about what it is that you do. And there's really going to be no differentiation, which is how you end up in these commoditized conversations where you end up being sold just on price. And price always seems to come up as an objection when we don't have a differentiated story. And the great thing about messaging is that it changes everything throughout your whole sales process. It helps you justify premium price, which in sales is one of our number one jobs is how do we justify our premium price compared to our low priced competitors. It's going to give you confidence, position you perfectly in the customer's mind. It's going to once again attract the right prospects and repel the ones that aren't a great fit and it's going to differentiate your offering. And lastly, it's going to help disrupt their status quo bias. Most people want to stay with what they're doing today, they have the status quo bias, the fear of making a change. So great messaging disrupts that status quo bias. So here's a messaging exercise that you can do. So create a table. So if you're listening to this on the podcast, you could jump over to YouTube, watch it there, where you can actually see the table that I'm describing here. But you have the desired outcomes of your customer, what they're trying to achieve, what are the problems or challenges that they're currently facing, what are the current or alternative approaches that they're trying to do to solve those problems or those challenges, and then what are the downsides and implications of taking that particular approach? These all out in a table. Put as many as you possibly can in here, and it's going to be a great starting point to get the juices flowing. But then how do you plug this into a magnetic message framework? The next thing you're going to want to do is really highlight your differentiated capabilities. So think about a particular data set or trend that's happening and impacting your customer. You want to pull out what is considered an unconsidered need. And so this is a unique way to address that particular challenge. This might be something that the customer hasn't thought about, the prospect might not be considering as a way to address that insight that's happening to them in their world. And then lastly, what is your unique capability that you provide to address that insight or that challenge that that exists in their world? And now what you could do is you could take that information and you could plug it in to a magnetic messaging framework. And so the framework is pretty straightforward, is first you talk about the desired outcome, then the problem, the way most people are trying to solve it, the problem with taking that particular approach, the consequences. So the negative consequences of, hey, if I do this thing, this is the impact that it's going to have on me. You talk about your differentiated solution and then the results your customer will likely achieve. So let's pull that into what a sentence or story might actually look like. So you have customer type comes to us when they're trying to achieve their desired outcome, but they're frustrated with problems. It could be problem 1, 2, 3, you know, number of them. You know, typically they will solve it by whatever that alternative approach is, but that can lead to the negative consequence. We take this differentiate approach that helps you achieve your desired outcomes. So now let's compare and contrast what, you know, bad message would look like and then what we as succession use for our messaging, for our magnetic message. So the old way is, hey, we're skill development platform for life science sales reps with on demand training and resources. And that's really boring, bland. It doesn't really differentiate us too much. We have some, you know, differentiation here. We're saying for life science sales reps. And maybe if you think that on demand training is good, you know, this might resonate with you, but it's really boring and bland and it kind of puts you in this sort of like commoditized bucket. But let's contrast that with, you know, the actual magnetic message here. So life science sales leaders come to us when they're trying to increase new business, but are frustrated with reps living in reactive mode and either not proactively generating new opportunities or letting prospects go dark. Typically, they try to solve it by hiring a consultant to train their whole team in a one size fits all training session. But reps have different experience and skill levels, which causes this traditional training model to fail. Only 43% of reps hit quota last year and 90% of training content is forgotten after just seven days. And we believe that each sales rep should have personalized training program on demand based on their specific skills to ensure that your sales strategy is being implemented to drive new business. Now, how is that for a magnetic message? If you think about all of the details within this, right? Is it data backed? We talk about only 43% of reps hitting quota. 90% of training content is forgotten after seven days. We talk about their goals of trying to drive new business challenges that they're likely facing. And then what are the outcomes and the differentiated ways that we're going to drive those particular outcomes. How are we different than the traditional sales training model? And so creating a sort of magnetic message is going to one, bring and attract any sales leader that is tired with their reps living in reactive mode and they're not generating enough opportunities or letting prospects go dark. That's going to attract those people directly to us, which is our best customers. And then on the flip side is we're going to probably repel people that just want to say, check the box that we did training and say, hey, we did this training session with our team, we hired this consultant, they came in and they did the training with everybody. You know, they just want to check the box that says we trained the team, you know, that's not going to be our great customer. And so we're trying to repel those people from us. And so you can see how the sort of magnetic message can really change the way your whole sales conversations can go. And so this will be infused into everything that you do across emails, conversations, you know, LinkedIn, when you talk about yourself to friends or family, whatever it is. Right. These are the types of ways that you need to always be talking about your business because it's going to attract the best possible customers to you. The third skill you have to master is you have to know your sales math. And I'm going to explicitly call out your sales math. So some of the mistakes that we see here is people don't know their own individual numbers. They don't have a strategy or plan, they don't know or track their own individual conversion rates. And so instead they use the company numbers to help figure out and work backwards from how they're going to hit their quota. And so what we see here is that people don't know their own numbers is a big gap. So track your own conversion rates that you have, your win rates, the conversion rate you have from prospecting to meeting, from meeting to opportunity. Know your particular numbers and use those numbers to work backward from your quota to figure out what you need to do to hit your target. And so to help with that, we have this spreadsheet here we call the Hit yout Quota Formula, where all you have to do is put in your quota and your different conversion metrics that you have for your particular sales process that you run individually, not your companies, but you personally. And once you plug in this information, at the time of recording this, it's January 17th, so there's 250 working days left in the year. And so what this spreadsheet will do is, will determine what exact activities you need to do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis in order to hit your quota. So you don't have to use this spreadsheet particularly. This is a great tool that you can use and you can find it in succession. But it's important that you actually do this work to know what you need to do. So you strategize and plan accordingly. The fourth skill is probably the most important and it's you have to commit to prospecting. A lot of the mistakes we see around new business generation in general is it's reactive versus proactive. People wait for opportunities to come to them rather than proactively going out and creating and finding new opportunities. A lot of people are scared to pick up the phone. They think the phone is dead. It couldn't be further from the truth. People have different communication styles. The phone still works. You need to call people. There are lots of tools out there that can make it more efficient. But the phone is your friend. A lot of mindset around prospecting is they don't want to come off as being annoying. You know, prospecting is part of your job. Your job is to go out and help your customers. So you need to flip your mindset from thinking that you're annoying people to how you're actually going to be able to help them. And you are interrupting them in order to help them. Most prospecting isn't consistent. So a lot of prospecting is done all at once, blasting off a bunch of emails. It's not a consistent flow of prospecting that happens all of the time. Prospecting is always the first thing that gets pushed. On most reps, calendars, they might block the time off, but if some other fire drill or something else comes up, they push it off till later in the day and then ultimately it doesn't happen and that just cycle continues over and over. And then lastly, ineffective follow up. A lot of messages just get sent once they hope that they get a response and there's lack of or no follow up that actually occurs to break into that account. Now, prospecting is not scary, right? It's not the boogeyman. Nobody ever got hurt from prospecting. Yes, you will face rejection. Yes, you will have resistance. These things happen. But it's not scary. It's not something that you need to worry about from like a physical harm perspective. It's just a mindset that you need to overcome. You need to overcome this fear of prospecting being the boogeyman, being this big scary obstacle. You just have to push through it. It's your job in sales to go find and create new opportunities. And you need to have that mindset if you're going to be successful. Now let's talk about what happens between low performers and high performers in sales. Low performers are chasing opportunities. They're waiting for opportunities to find them. They have a fear of rejection. They're always putting out quote unquote fires that happen, right? They're always busy, they're working a lot, but not working on the right thing. And then they give up after no response. Whereas high performers go out and create their own opportunities. They're proactively engaging prospects across multiple channels. They anticipate and react to rejection. They commit the time to prospect and they actually do it right. So they respect their own time blocks that they set and they're pleasantly persistent. They follow up in a pleasant manner, provide value to their prospects. Now, the keys to prospecting. We talked about this a little bit. But you have to have the right attitude and mindset. You have a product or service that helps people. You help them get their job done better. And so you are doing them a disservice by not proactively reaching out to them and helping them solve that problem that they have. Right? So think about it from that perspective. You have those sort of intentions when you do your prospecting, and you'll get better results. You need to create magnetic messaging. We talked about that already. How do you build that? How do you work that into your prospecting messages? You need to leverage multiple channels, the phone, email, LinkedIn, direct mail, show up in person, leverage all the different ways that you can to get in touch with somebody because different people have different forms of communication that they prefer. You need to push past resistance. There's a quote out there that says the sales process doesn't start until you get the first no. And I really believe that you have to push through resistance. And that's your job as a sales rep. You can't give up at the first no that you get. Prospecting is a great way to leverage your creativity. You can come up with new, creative, innovative ways to stand out from all the noise and actually get meetings with people on the calendar. You have to do it consistently. You have to do it every single day. Block off a time on your calendar and do it every day and commit to actually doing prospecting. It will be the number one thing that will help you close more business. If you consistently prospect, you will consistently find more opportunities and you will consistently close those opportunities. And the more you do it, the better you are. If you do it on a consistent basis, you're going to continue to get better. If you do it once, you're going to and you blast off a message, there's no iterations and there's no improvement from that process. So block off the time dedicated to prospecting and do it. The fifth skill you have to master is you have to master great discovery calls. So a lot of the mistakes that we see with discovery calls, which are your first conversation that you typically have with a customer or prospect, is that you show up and throw up. You come in, you talk all about yourself, you, you present what your solution is capable of, and that is your presentation, right? You don't do any probing or deep dives into the challenges that they're facing, identifying the root cause, tying those back to business impact. All you do is you show up and you present. You do a pain and pitch at best, right? Or maybe you figure out what problem somebody has and then immediately jump into how you can solve it without understanding is that problem worth solving or what the root cause of that problem even is. Because if you don't know what the root cause of the problem is, how can you propose a solution that is going to actually solve that particular root cause of the problem? Most people don't do any pre call planning. They just show up and they run through the same set of questions that they always do. And then lastly, most people don't even end up with a micro commitment or schedule next steps at the end of the call. And so what you really have to do is structure a great discovery call. You need to have a primary and secondary objective. What are you trying to get out of this call? And if you can't get that, what is your next fallback objective that you're going to get? You have to prepare and practice for the questions that you're going to ask. Be ready to handle objections that might come up or questions that your customer prospect might have. You have to build rapport and set the agenda for the call. Let them know what's going to happen. These are the things that we're going to cover and these are the objectives that we're looking to get out of this call. And then ask is there anything else that they want to get out of this call. In particular, you really have to dig into the problem, the root cause and the business impact of whatever it is that's going on in their business or the challenges that they're facing. If you can't align to a big, high priority and urgent problem and you don't know what the root cause of it is, and you don't know how that impacts the business, you're probably not going to close that deal. Especially right now when it's really hard to get budget, especially for expensive items. You have to go deep and really understand what the business impact is of that problem so that you can craft a business case that can be used to unlock budget. You need to actively seek objections. Most reps stay away from objections, but the best reps seek them out. They want to know what objections that prospect has so they can resolve them as quickly as possible. Because an objection today can just linger and linger and linger on into the future. And that's when your deal stall. That's when you get ghosted and that's when you have to close lost that opportunity. You don't want to waste your time on bad deals. You need to qualify all of your opportunities and that happens best when you do deep discovery. And so if you're qualifying the right opportunities and you're qualifying out the bad ones, you're not going to waste your time on those bad deals. A lot of reps spend time following up and following up and following up on these opportunities that were dead from the beginning because they didn't do great discovery. And then lastly, you must always schedule the next steps on the calendar with that person before you leave the meeting. And you need to sell the what's in it for them? The wifm. Why should they actually show up to that meeting? If it's just to check in, see what's up to see what the feedback is, that's not a good reason to have a meeting on the calendar. Sell the wifm. What's in it for them? Why should they actually show up to this meeting? And so here's a discovery framework that you can use to help you guide your discovery conversations. You need to understand the current state, what's going on in your prospect's world today. You need to identify the problems, what problems are they facing and then what are the root causes of those problems and then if not solved, what are the negative impact to their business? There's, there's, this is really, really important because this is how you're going to unlock big budgets is by solving business impact problems. Just because somebody has a problem doesn't mean they need to solve it now and doesn't mean it's a big enough problem that they're going to pay a premium in order to solve it. And then only after you do all of that can you actually then jump into what are the different solutions to solve the root cause of the problems that they have. So if you don't know what the root cause is of the problem, how can you prescribe a particular solution? The example I like to give is let's say you're sales rep and you're not hitting your target. Well, there's many reasons why you might not be hitting your target, right? That is the problem. Problem is you're not hitting your target. What are the root causes? Well, you might not be generating enough pipeline. Maybe you're not closing deals well enough. And then if you take that down into another level, well, let's say you don't have enough opportunities. Well, within that it could be your messaging isn't good in prospecting. It could be that you're not prioritizing prospecting. These are all the root causes of the problem, of you not hitting your number. And each of those has different solutions that are tied to them. If your messaging is mad, then you need to fix your messaging. That is the solution. If you're not prioritizing prospecting, then you need to actually prioritize it. So the different solutions to solve the problem, same thing for your customer. You have to understand what the root cause is, the business impact of not solving it, and then what are the solutions that they could deploy to solve the root cause. And then finally, this seems obvious, but a lot of people just skip this step is you have to actually ask them do they want to evaluate your solution as a way to solve their problem. And this is where a lot of people don't ask the hard question at the end of the discovery conversation and you get the oh yeah, send me over quote or send me over some information and then you never hear from them ever again. So book those next steps, do a soft close, ask them to move to the next step, agree to actually move forward to evaluate your solution as a way to solve their problem. The sixth skill that you need to master is you need to drive deals to close. So a lot of problems, what we see around, once you've identified that opportunity, you've had a great discovery call with them. A lot of the mistakes come around not multi threading. You don't have a business case, you don't have a real champion. And without a real champion, you don't have a deal. You don't sell the next step on why it's important. So you get ghosted. You're reactive to legal and procurement problems. You hope that they don't come up. You hope that you don't have to go through a legal review or that procurement has to get involved. You need to resolve these proactively. And lastly, you fail to overcome indecision. So there are two parts of every sales deal and every opportunity. There is the fact that you have to disrupt the status quo early on in the process. That typically will happen in the discovery phase and in your presentation where you have to disrupt their status quo. You have to get them to want to say, yes, we need to make a change, we need to solve this problem. But then you also have to overcome indecision. We'll see some stats here in just a sec. But indecision is one of the biggest reasons that deals are closed lost, even if they've said that they want to make a change. And so 44% of deals that end up lost in action are due to the customer's preference for the status quo. So that's the first half 44% of deals that are lost are because of the status quo. We haven't got them to say we want to make a change. And then as well, 56% of the time, of those ones that are lost, the customer expresses a desire to abandon their status quo, but for one reason or another, they're unwilling or unable to make a decision and commit. So this is where you have to overcome indecision. And there are three core types of indecision that you have to overcome. This is research from a book called the Jolt Effect. It was a follow on from the Challenger sale and the Challenger customer, where they analyzed like millions of hours of sales calls. Maybe it's millions of minutes, but a ton of different sales calls. And they found that all of the deals are being lost to indecision. These are the three components of it. You have valuation problems where somebody's worried about choosing the wrong option. You have lack of information problems where they're concerned that they haven't done enough homework or done enough research to make the right decision. Or they have outcome uncertainty, so their fear that they won't get what they're actually paying for. And so you have to have a way to overcome these three different types of indecision. And first off, you just have to identify which one you're up against. Are they worried about making the decision between two options? Are they continually asking you for more data, more information? Right. Are they just worried that they haven't done enough homework? If you identify that now you know how to overcome it. They have outcome uncertainty. How can you take risk off the table for them if they're not sure they're going to get the results that they want? What can you do creatively to come up with a solution to limit the downside of risk for them? Right. So it's really important that you overcome the indecision that happens throughout the sales process. But you have to know that it exists in order to do that. And so now you can look for these particular points of indecision in your sales processes. Next one is multi threading. A lot of people talk to one person and they hope that they're going to champion the deal and take it all the way to close. And so what is multi threading? It's the process of developing relationships with multiple people involved in the buying committee. Typically, there's multiple people that are always going to be involved in almost every deal. Unless you're selling something that is like a reagent or an individual can just buy it low ticket item, not something that has a lot of process involved in the decision. You may even be talking to a decision maker for something that is more expensive. But they'll probably want input from other people on their team. And so it's important that you know that there are multiple decision makers involved in every process. And so you need to build relationships with them. The other thing that you can do with multithreading is it's not just about multithreading with them, it's also about multithreading on your end. So you can bring in people from your team, an fas, a technical specialist, because they add value to your sales process as well. So multi threading is on both sides of the equation, your end and the prospect's side. And one thing that a lot of reps miss is they don't build a bulletproof business case. They're not arming their champion with a story to go and tell to sell for them on their behalf when they can't be in the room. Most deals are done behind closed doors internally within that organization. It's not sold when you're on the phone with them or when you're on the call with them. So you need to build a business case. And when you look at what is inside of a business case is you're talking about the problem statement, the root cause, the negative impact if they don't solve it. What is the agreed upon solution that you're going to be using? What results should they expect or when? What's the timeline by when they should expect those results? And then what are the potential risks that you're actually going to mitigate for them? And what is the mitigation plan if those risks should come up? And this is how executives think is they think in these manners. What is the problem that we're trying to solve? What is the potential solution? When can I expect these results? And if things go wrong, how are we planning to solve them? So create this business case and give it to your champion so they can take it and go sell it internally when you can't be in the room. The seventh and final skill that you have to master is you have to own your calendar. Too often we see reps prioritizing non selling activities. These are activities like support, servicing, technical troubleshooting. These are the things that take away from your time proactively selling and growing your accounts. And a lot of the times what happens here is they confuse being busy for sales activity. They're doing all of this stuff supporting their customers and they're, you know, spending hours a week doing it. And they're confusing that for sales activity like it. Sure, it's things that might need to get done, but they're probably not things that you specifically have to do. You are hired and paid a great salary in order to go and drive new business, not to go and handhold and support customers. That needs to be handled by somebody else on the team when your goal is to find and grow your accounts. And lastly, there's no disciplined time blocking. People will put time blocks on their calendar, but they don't actually follow through with them. The time comes, they don't take action on what they're supposed to do, they push it off, they push it off and then it never gets done. You have to be disciplined in your time blocking and hold yourself accountable. Your number one priority is closing new business. Number one priority. Any other activities outside of that are a distraction. If you think about the activities that help you drive new business, you need to create opportunities and you need to close opportunities. On the create side, it's all about prospecting, discovery, lead, follow up and events. Those are the things that are driving and creating new opportunities. And on the closing side is about the demos, presentations, multi threading proposals dealing with legal and procurement. Those are what you need to do to close those deals. And so if any activities fall out of these core create opportunities and close opportunities buckets, those things need to be reassessed and evaluated for either being removed from your calendar or they're delegated to somebody else. So if you know anything about the Eisenhower matrix, it's a two by two quadrant where on the Y axis you have things that are not important or important. And on the x axis you have things that are urgent or are not urgent. And so in the upper left quadrant here you have things that are important and urgent. These are tasks with deadlines and you have to do them. And if you don't do them, there are consequences. These are things like discovery, demos, presentations and lead follow up. Right? They have to get done. They have to get done now. Now. On the not urgent side, but they're also important. These are things that you need to schedule. So these have unclear deadlines, but they contribute to long term success. These are things like territory, planning, prospecting, proposals, attending events, right? These are the types of things that you have to do. They're really, really important, but they're not urgent. And so if you don't schedule them and you don't stick to them, they're not going to get done. And in the bottom left you have the not important but urgent section. These are things that must get done, but they don't require you. These are things that need to delegate and these are things like customer support, servicing needs, the things that are not proactive new business, generating activities. And then in the bottom right you have the not urgent and not important. These are distractions and unnecessary tasks that you can delete, not do. And this is basically everything else that doesn't fall under the create and close set of activities that you need to do to drive new business. And if there's one thing that you could take away from owning your calendar, it's time blocking. And specifically time blocking for prospecting. Because prospecting always gets pushed and it gets pushed aside. And it's the number one thing that will help you generate new business prospect. And so here's what you're going to do. You're going to block off and commit to one hour every single morning for prospecting. And you're going to do it and you're going to do it every single day. You're going to do it in the morning. So it happens and it gets done before you open up your email, before you respond to customers, before you open up slack, start talking to your team. You're going to prospect. And when you do this, I guarantee you do this for 30 days in a row, you are going to have more opportunities than you can imagine. You're going to hit your number and you are going to be a better sales rep. So block off the time and commit to doing it. All right, let's recap here. So the seven skills that you need to close more deals. Number one, prioritize growable accounts. Number two, create magnetic messaging. Number three, know your sales math. Number four, commit to prospecting. Number five, execute great discovery calls. Number six, drive deals to close. And number seven, own your calendar. And if you master these seven skills, I guarantee that you will be able to sell in any economic environment. Whether that's challenging times like we have today or the boom times we hopefully have in the future. These seven skills are just fundamental sales skills that you must master if you want to be a highly successful and well paid sales representative. So hopefully you enjoyed this video and you got a lot of value from it. If you want more and you want to go deeper onto these different topics, you'll come and join Succession. It's a platform dedicated to life science sales professionals that want to improve their sales skills. So come and join us. A lot of great stuff in there and if you like this video, give it a like and throw something in the comments. Let us know what you think about it. If you want us to go deeper on these videos, or if you want more of these types of videos, just let us know and we'll get these made.