One of sport’s most well-known quotes is surely from 9-time golf major champion, Gary Player; “the more I practice, the luckier I get“.

So I was intrigued to catch a CNN chat with him alongside 20-year old Northern Ireland prodigy, Rory McIlroy. Player was asked to pass on wisdom. He gladly obliged.

His first point was that he did not believe in tiredness. He felt that the human body had huge tolerance meaning that you should always push yourself. He then recounted a brief summary of his recent itinerary, culminating in a gym session that would make many an athlete raise an eyebrow, let alone a 74-year old like him.

Then he revisited the hard work mantra. There are, he beamed, no shortcuts.

Premiership managers are often heard talking about how they must first reach 40 points. It is at such a mark that they feel they preserve their prized status for another year. Gain 40 points, so the theory goes, and after all 38 games are done and dusted, you won’t be relegated.

Yet I heard a fascinating insight from a former Charlton player and S African international, Shaun Bartlett. During Alan Curbishley’s (widely considered successful) reign, he felt that they had the 40-pt mantra drummed into them so much, that when they reached the threshold (often laughably early, even during Feb) then the players, however unknowingly, relaxed. Every year they seemed to fall off a cliff and win no more points.

He firmly felt that this was an under-achievement, and one that could have been prevented.

The same holds true for sales performance on so many levels. The obvious pair of approaches are to break-down the target into smaller chunks and have target-steps.

In the context of football, this would mean earning points over different segments of the season. Ideally, the target would be more than you actually need (say 12 points from each 9 season-quarter games). Also, targeting a mini-league of games (where you pace yourself against your most vulnerable opponents) could also be a different, and more effective, way forward.

Such thinking when applied to solution sales can encompass your own seasonality, type of client or competitor and provide the kind of over-achievement clearly lacking from Charlton.

I just saw an interview with a former CEO of BP, John Browne. He was pressed in typically rolling-news-knock-everything fashion that going into business was surely solely about the pursuit of making money.

His response certainly resonated with me, as his answer suggested that if collecting huge wads of cash alone is your goal, then you’ll be unlikely to succeed.

Instead, he remarked that you should focus rather on creating change, and making people feel better.

It is a sentiment that I see missing from many a pitch. How is what you propose really going make a change for the better?

On a slightly tangential note for us solution sellers, I came across an interview with a Swiss chap that founded a hotel chain. A quarter of a century later, the firm has 50 hotels throughout S Africa.

Always interested in company founders, the most striking thing disclosed for me was how it all started,

“It was a very simple deal,” he remembers. “Most deals that are simple work.”

Even now I can look at a proposal for something ‘new’ and be staggered at how tricky it is to grasp first-time-round. Over-complication is a killer.

Although we may not be trying to buy a half-built hotel ourselves, the ownership structure (a cash/sweat-equity split) and simple target (1,000 rooms in five years) seem on the surface remarkably straightforward and equally applicable to many a fresh solution proposal.

Who has what responsibility, and what is the target for acceptance?

[As an aside, it is interesting also to note that Hans Enderle grew his young chain with a cost leadership strategic focus, in part it appears, by taking advantage of his competitors failure to fully exploit what they believed to be their differentiated offer, with a telling line stating how he removed 'unprofitable fripperies' from his hotels.]

Your deadline is Friday. It’s the end of the month, quarter, year. Everything is in place. You’ve been promised the deal, signatures, purchase order, deposit. Zero hour looms and Bang. One small thing is amiss. The person who can fix it is back in on Monday. What’s the big deal, they ask…

It only happens once in a career, then you know what you must do in future.

A scenario unfolded where this could have happened with a piece of business I was involved with just this last month-end.

The potential stumbling blocks featured an approval process that touched two separate computer systems as well as, we uncovered, a dozen different individuals.

Despite assurances that everything was in order, we made sure one of us still travelled three hours to be in situ. A desk was provided so that he may work in between being on hand. This was all especially pertinent as we realised that if we missed this window, the next would be at the earliest a tear-inducing three months hence.

Of course, the inescapable roadblock ensued. Not just one though. Three. On three separate occasions, a piece of info was either not considered quite right, or was asked for completely afresh. Thankfully, the whole team was on hand to email the necessary, as well as the person on-site being able to physically chase the approval and info trail around the building.

Experience then tells you to be there, whenever you can, for the big ones going down to the wire, especially when you’re exchanging rings for the first time.

I got a terrific wine rack, made from the staves of a Steenberg Merlot barrel by a Cape Town oak artisan. He spends most weekends in various shopping centres standing with a display of his craft. As I saw with my own eyes, his wares are a chic magnet.

Yet when two women wanted to take photos I realised there was a sales trick going begging.

The first hesitantly asked for permission to take a photo (of his hammock). The second was a touch more upfront, but still laboured to take a pic of an oak-framed mirror.

In both cases he was asked. Why wasn’t there a sign saying please take photos to show at home?

Hammock lady took a second, and for it, he actually stood in the pic and smiled! Unbelievable. Why he isn’t taking these photos for his prospects, with them next to or using his products, is criminal. And imagine if he offered it up as an idea himself. He’d then offer to email it on, so gain their address to follow-up with. What a pleasure. Sales would surely soar.

In the retail environment, this is clearly a winner, and so seldom deployed it hurts.

Yet I sense it also has a role in b2b solution sales. For a long time now I’ve taken to using on the spur of the moment video ‘interviews’ that support my cause (even better when they involve your prospect’s customers by the way). So why not where you can have a bank of useful piccies of your prospects using your products, to cunningly insert into proposals, slides and the like?

I was in an informal first-meet the other day. It lasted around half-an-hour in a coffee shop that offered that wonderful Zumex-enabled fresh orange juice I’m so fond of.

The chap the ‘other side’ of the table was interested in one specific project, for which we had a neat one-page summary pdf we could send through (that we’d earlier crafted for a previous, yet fortunately very similar, request).  He asked for this alone, and despite knowledge of a wealth of further documentation available from us, specifically stated that it would be enough to go in before we spoke again.

So what would you have sent?

I was firmly on the side of sending the 1-pager as agreed and following up. My painful findings are that it is more often the case that too much, rather than too little, info curtails your plans.

I had quite a job persuading the person responsible for sending that this was the reality. It struck me that there really is a prevailing view among those with no sales experience that it is always best to send through as much as you can. The belief persisting that this shows you being ‘helpful’ is a giant misnomer.

Where did this come from? Isn’t it time to change the world, one tiny step at a time…?

I was judging presentations as part of a sales training exercise for a client when the first team up ended with a close routine suggesting the prospect be flown around the world to visit as a reference an undeniably aspirational location.

The three following teams picked up on this and dangled ever more exotic jollies.  Not happy to merely settle for reference visits, they also threw in hospitality ideas, including meeting F1 stars in Monaco.

Much merriment was had by all as each team tried to outdo the preceding promises.  There are though serious points to be taken from this.

I would personally avoid using hospitality as part of a first-time sale campaign.  If competition offers it first then I accept that it can be tough to hold your nerve, especially if they’re an incumbent.  It means you have to achieve better and deeper politicking, which can be an unattractive pursuit.

If the relationship is established, then as tricky as it is you ought really consider what development of your shared agenda the privilege should create.  I myself have attended all manner of envy-inducing sporting events across the globe on the most tenuous of connections which I’m sure would have made each paying firm’s boss apoplectic.

As for reference visits, the reality is that they are rarely truly required.  In a beauty parade there may well be some stipulation for one across all prospective vendors, but even then you can still frame the process to suit you, if you think about it hard enough and also utilise several communication options.

When you’re in a single bid situation, insistence on a reference visit can easily extend a buying cycle with all the associated trauma of potentially letting in an eleventh hour bidder or sideways obstacle to derail you.  I got so tired of this a few years ago that I made the visit part of post-signing acceptance (between delivery and invoicing to a max number of days) which seemed to work well.  This policy was especially useful given how irrelevant such corroboration turns out to be once the product’s already arrived.

Which brings me on to the best way to handle reference requests.  Validate instead.  If there is any way that you can let the prospect experience your prodcut for themselves, in their own (often simulated, but that’s fine) environment, then the benefits will be bountiful.

A main conclusion of this book should spark any solution seller into action: First impressions (and its sibling “rapid cognition”) are so powerful and so open to subconscious prejudice, that you must do all you can to control them in your favour.

Apparently many of us are expert in a particular thing. And when confronted with something in that arena, we instantly know the right judgement about it. This ‘thin-slicing’ means that as an expert, you can take only the slightest morsel of information, or a slim snapshot in time when exposed to it, and make an absolute decision, with clarity and correctness.

The book is terrific at taking you through the funnels, visors, constraints and freedoms that you must deploy in order to make the most of this stunning innate ability. Many can be readily adapted for the solution sale environment.

Thin-Slice Success

The first insight I’d say I gleaned, is to thin-slice your own deal success. What little things happen every single time you win a deal? They might occur in the blink of an eye, or they may be seemingly trivial (re)actions, steps or conversations, but each time they take place, you win. Once identified, what can you do to get them cropping up more often on every campaign?

Spot Emotional Override

From a psychological viewpoint, I found myself knowingly nod along to descriptions of positive or negative sentiment override. It cropped up in relation to whether married couples would survive (the answer always being no if Contempt surfaced) and can be felt whenever either +ve or -ve emotion overrides irritability. If you sense the latter, you’re losing the deal.

First Word Game

A new game I invented reading this, was to ask prospects for the very first word that enters their head when you mention … [choose a relevant topic of your choice]. Experts think differently, and as every buyer will think they’re an expert in their field, this test will uncover their true thoughts - and note that if they delay in any way, then perhaps they’re not on your side.

Never Pre-judge

One salesman was referenced, a car rep called Bob Golomob. A pair of atypical traits made him top achiever in his field. He’d always call visitors up the next day, and he never let initial impressions alter his approach. The latter proved critical. Scruffy students would bring their rich parent the next day to pay, as would confused wives their husbands and vice versa.

Crucial Decision Criteria

Learn the lessons of heart attack diagnosis taken from America’s Cook County Chicago hospital. Faced with iffy results and rising costs, they eventually focused on just 4 key criteria that provided diagnosis more accurate than deploying the dozens of criteria together that doctors heuristically used. What are the handful of key points that’ll determine your project success and put all others into the shade?

Exposing Prejudice

Before candidates were shielded from view, conductors never took on female musicians. With screens, they flourished. Where could in-built (yet hidden, subconscious) prejudice hinder your proposal, and what can you do to expose it?

And here’s a few one-liners

• according to topic guru Gary Klein, the key to decision making under pressure is simply to act. (ie make that decision and make it now)
• often a sign of expertise is noticing what isn’t there, or doesn’t happen
• for snap purchase decisions, limit the choice (the jam story was classic - only 3% of shoppers shopping at a display with 24 types of jam bought, whereas a whopping 30% stopped when the same space featured just 6 labels)
• margarine didn’t sell until changing its colour from white to yellow
• it’s the new and different products that a re always the most vulnerable to market research (in which cases it can’t be trusted)
• I loved how a ‘triangle test’ can fudge and confuse people’s expectations and answers (wiktionary definition: A test in which a potential consumer is asked to determine blindly which of three similar items is not identical to the other two.)
• Avoid ‘mind-blindness’ - the inability to make a correct decision - by making sure your heartbeat is not raised (no ‘arousal’) and that you have plenty of time

And finally, possibly my favourite passage is a brilliant lesson for any sales manager in how best to work with the people reporting for you. (It happens to be the musing of a war veteran who went on to become a hugely successful maverick commander):

On Paul Van Riper’s first tour in South East Asia, when he was out in the bush, serving as an advisor for the South Vietnamese, he would often hear gunfire in the distance.

He was then a young lieutenant new to combat, and his first thought was always to get on the radio and ask the troops in the field what was happening.

After several weeks of this, however, he realised that the people he was calling on the radio had no more idea than he did about what the gunfire meant.

It was just gunfire.

It was the beginning of something - but what that something was was not yet clear.

So Van Riper stopped asking.

On his second tour of Vietnam, whenever he heard gunfire, he would wait.

“I would look at my watch,” Van Riper says, “and the reason I looked was that I wasn’t going to do a thing for five minutes.

If they needed help, they were going to holler.

And after five minutes, if things had settled down, I still wouldn’t do anything.

You’ve got to let people work out the situation and work out what’s happening.

The danger in calling is that they’ll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake.

Plus you are diverting them.

Now they are looking upward instead of downward.

You’re preventing them from resolving the situation.”

Serena Williams is still on top of her game, yet looked down and out in her Aussie Open Quarter when four-love adrift to Victoria Azarenka in the second set, having also lost the opener.

But somehow she turned it around to triumph  4-6, 7-6 (7/4), 6-2.

As she walked towards the dressing room upon victory, Todd Woodbridge asked her what she was thinking at four-nil down.

Her first admission was, “oh well, at least I’m still in the doubles“, before astonishingly going on with, “I was actually thinking ‘If I lose today and I lose in doubles I think I can catch a flight on Friday’. That’s not what a champion is supposed to think, but that’s what I was thinking“.

I subsequently read that at 0-4, she shook herself up. Literally. The turnaround was incredible. It just goes to show, even when you think you’re history, a renewed attitude and starting over can heave you all the way back and lead to being perched on top of the podium.

As a footnote, it’s a shame that Jim Courier wasn’t on duty courtside (it looks like he only interviews the men) as his performances with the mic have been revelatory and often hilarious, and one of his mantras during his rise to world number one was that ‘it’s never over until it’s over’. They could have riffed together on that for a while I bet.