One newspaper review of the season made me think of many a sales conference hoo-rah I’ve been to.

When it comes to doling out the champers, the prizes often lack any fizz of their own. Anyone over quota (rightly) gets a gong of course, with the numero uno a special mention. But that’s about it. Yet there’s so much more to enliven proceedings. And crucially, also improve motivation.

The categories of accolades I read were as follows;

best player, manager, goal, match, signing & pundit

worst flop, biggest gripe, change for next season & is the league stlil the world’s best?

There’s a lot to take from these I fancy. What about ideas from this bunch;

best deal, most improved rep, ideal win, best upsell, shortest winning campaign, best first-meeting to deal ratio, best competitive unseat, most new product sold & perfect process addition

And you can easily add in a few comedy ones of your own for a moment of levity too.

At a recent conference, English school bosses were derided for coining the phrase ‘teachability‘. Its context; do teachers want to learn?

They also talked about wanting to promote ‘learning enthusiasts’.

Apparently, teachers in this camp exhibit three traits;

• constant discussion and sharing of best-practice
• working in all areas throughout the school, not just their own dept
• out-of-hours involvement

I instantly thought of Sales teams. How many reps show up in any, let alone all, of these three?

When it comes to best-practice improvements, can those performing be defined by two poles; the quiet lone wanderer or the gregarious altruist? With by far the largest group being the former? How many salespeople genuinely indulge in any two-way debate around best-practice?

What about the number of reps that communicate with departments where the typical person does not have an expense account?

And how much do they put in outside the nine-to-five?

A couple of years ago, I was running a brief session at a client’s sales conference. A time-filler really, but one aligned with a key initiative. I’m often asked to do this kind of spontaneous event.

At one point, I asked the assembled twitch of reps (anxious to head bar-wards no doubt) how many were currently reading a sales book.

Not a single soul put up their hands.

Any kind of businessy book then? Still nothing. One guy was wading through some well-known nonsense American self-help bible. That was it.

Where are all the sales learning enthusiasts? Surely if you are one, you will easily out-perform and out-earn your peers.

They sought to inform us of what constitutes the perfect elevator pitch. That’s ‘lift’, in proper English. So, here’s the nugget, “Instead of stumbling when asked, “What does your company do?” [...]

Prepare an effective pitch that outlines win-win goals and launches a deeper relationship.

Grab the listeners’ attention with a smart hook, and then convince them of the mutual benefits you cold [sic] provide.

End by suggesting a follow-up and converting a chance meeting into an opportunity.

Speak in terms your audience can relate to.

And communicate with the passion that comes from knowing that this opportunity may never come again.”

Well. I make that seven pointers. Insipid. Vacuous. Off the top of my head, here’s five elements. Write a single sentence on each. Deliver in 30 seconds.

1. state a key problem you resolve
2. say why you want to change the world
3. give a real-life example for proof
4. rattle off a list of actual names that like you
5. suggest a plan of action

Still, it could be worse. The HBR’s advice is almost trumped by where the wikipedia page on this directs you…

Here’s exact text I came across as posted through a corporate comment box. The kind that hopes for random contact from a cold prospect. It was headed “Thought regarding your website“, and subheaded “google“;

I’ve helped hundreds of companies increase their traffic and I’d love to show you what my service can do for you. I don’t promise the world, I’m straight forward and to the point … I deliver rankings. My rates are completely affordable and I don’t want to oversell you either, I start small and have my clients begging for more. I won’t take on your site unless I know I can deliver rankings. Reply to this e-mail if you have the slightest interest … you’ll never see rankings the same way again.

Remarkable. In a bad way.

Whether it be direct mail, unsolicited email or a web-posting, this kind of approach is sadly all so familiar. I hope you don’t do it this way.

It is so obviously spam. The final sentence even still begs ‘reply to this email’, bizarre as there is no email of course.

The pronoun “I” features a staggering ten times in these just five sentences. The word “my” a further three.

Given that the sender must have been on the website to fill in the comment box in the first place, it is incredible that not a single mention of what the target company does is made. Not even a glimmer of how a match to potential business issues could exist.

Think of your last cold(-ish) pitch. Could it have come across like this too?

On Radio 4 Thursday, I heard him explain more. Here’s a taster of his publisher’s blurb;

[it] reveals the biology of bubbles and crashes; and …how stress in the workplace can affect our risk-taking

His stand-out conclusion is;

morning testosterone predicts a trader’s afternoon profits

His study began with the question of whether the winner effect, observed across several species, also rang true for humans. Namely,

statistically, if an animal has just won a fight, then they are more likely to win the next

Whilst he was careful to say he found it hard to make solid prescriptions for business leaders, he did discover that testosterone levels in men followed this. In the immediate aftermath of a ‘victory’, traders were way more aggressive and took more risks. And it appears, were more likely to follow-up with another ‘win’.

For sales people this offers a potentially brilliant insight. I often cite this tale as a major influence on my career. In my cubrep days, a senior salesrep landed a whale. So big in fact, that just three weeks into the financial year, he’d hit his target. When he came into the office, inked order in hand, congratulations rained on him. When the drenching stopped, he simply sat back down at this desk. Picked up the phone. And started making cold calls.

That doesn’t quite conform to the more aggression/risk finding, but does show a similar theme. (Can it really be true that the top winners take more risks?)

He was hot. And when are you ever going to be hotter? So he decided to make hay.

This winner effect has further possible consequences too. Throughout any sales campaign, you earn little victories. Whether it be a first-time appointment booked, on a shortlist with your timetable being followed, or negotiations beginning. What do you do after these types of progress occur? And how can you make them happen more often?

Two elements emerged that piqued my Sales antennae. First, his daughter Chris praised his phrase that exhorted him to leave a cushy job. A number he could have carried perfectly comfortably on with, right until his decent pension, for another twenty years. He feared;

tramlines to the grave

Just when everything appeared to be what conformists would describe as “going well” career-wise, he felt the need to change tack. He realised he had plateaued. Only a new challenge, and a serious push beyond his ‘comfort zone’ would do.

So in 1961, he left what he considered the best science job in England and dived into the then three-year old NASA. Originally, it seems, his job was to confirm whether life existed on Venus or Mars.

On arrival, he reckoned he riled every other biologist. Which brings me to the second steer. All his best work appears to have come when practically banished by his fellow biology clan. Rather than hang around and interact all day, every day, with biologists, he was forced to work alongside other strains of science. The achievements of which he is most proud came in this time. He firmly believes that to get your best results, you need to work with those outside your natural peer, role and subject grouping.

So what does all this tell the aspiring Salesy CEO?

The first is probably the toughest. When you have reached a pinnacle, life is all so rosy. Quota busting an annual occurrence, your opinion actively sought, everybody knows your name. Yet this could well be precisely the time to discover a new direction, or at least tangent.

Where’s your next promotion going to be? The next product or sector you want to specialise in? How can you avoid locking on to the ‘tramlines to the grave’?

The second is more straightforward. I remember a while back hearing the Glaxo boss encouraging inter-disciplinary team working. You get more ideas and better results when exposed to and interacting with people from different arenas, went his theory.

I myself remember as a cub rep how my embryonic career started to show a rapid rise when I sat next a programmer, known throughout our customer base as simply ‘GRD’, the Great Rob Davies.

I had deliberately eschewed sitting in the sales pen. I didn’t like it. Although I liked most of the sales team, there were too many distracting chats, no real teamwork vibe, and smokers.

When my boss insisted we re-arrange the office (after many months of productive working the way it was) I was gutted. I wedged a golf club as a mast in my cubicle, flying as its flag a message about how I loved my desk. Time to move on.

I genuinely felt sitting among the techies had helped my selling. Who do you sit next to in your office? I bet most salespeople are all lumped together. Just about every sales environment I can think of walking around, it is that way. I wonder how many mix it up? I believe when you do, it’s one more step on the path to world-beating selling.

Here’s an entertaining bar chart.

Yeah, I know it’s about the Euro. Not everybody’s riveting cup o’ tea. But the point is, look at what the comparisons made are.

When we as solution sellers put up such bars, we seldom show this sort of creativity.

What else could you compare with? If you sell on productivity gains, then where else in your prospect is productivity measured? If you sell on cash returns, then where else does the dosh come in so?

Also, what a delight to see this as a standalone paragraph.

And here is your tweetable fact:

A monetary union might make more sense for every nation starting with the letter “M” than it does for the euro zone.

Reminds me of a recent post of mine too.

Our new man in “the impossible job” seems to be a convert to a sixties revolutionary, one-time FA Technical Director Allen Wade.

In his remarks on coaching, Wade suggested;

There are, reputedly, two stages through which worthwhile ideas must pass before they are accepted. In the first stage they are ignored, in the second, ridiculed.

Stage 1 you’re ignored, Stage 2 you face ridicule. This reminded me of another footie related sales nugget I came across over four years ago. Change apparently faces these 4 stages; denial/anger, confusion, renewal, contentment.

Feel like anything you’ve experienced on a big deal lately?

And what can you do to overcome these hurdles? To expect them, is to clear them.

As an aside, if “ball possession is everything”, then what is our Sales equivalent? Owning the process? I’d say so.

…If only Wade’s successor, long-ball clown Ted Hughes, hadn’t undeservingly cemented himself in at the unfit-for-purpose FA all those years, and put us back decades.

The most naturally gifted person ever to bridge upon the green baize has shown remarkable focus (for him) since deploying the services of the Brain Mechanic.

When interviewed on telly between sessions Sunday, Dr Steve Peters proved remarkable and compelling. How refreshing to hear someone so different from the quack pop-psychology side of the business. A psychiatrist, not a psychologist.

His main thesis appears to be that we have two teams competing to run our brain; a human one, and an interfering one. The former is logical, yet the latter emotional and irrational - and crucially, stronger. It is this team that is the “chimp”. To stop being sabotaged, you must “box your chimp”.

I guess to learn how to do so, you must buy his book. But it is yet again interesting to know that to fulfil your potential, you have to banish anxiety that comes from the fear of failure.

How is your Sales environment set up to allow that?

When in America recently, watching the Republicans tear themselves to shreds, I noted one particular debate question recur; Define your brand of conservatism in one sentence.

And Boris got asked the same thing before his mayoral election too.

In one particular article, I read his answer as follows;

freedom, democracy, taxpayer value and building up the sense of neighbourliness and duty towards each other

I am, overall, a tax-cutting Conservative,

I think, basically, parliament should be sovereign

How often do you hear an interrogator go after this type of soundbite? Quite often.

What about when we’re in the field? Ever get a prospect asking the same kind of question? Happens a lot in out-of-hours networking situations too.

So, how do you answer it? Can you sum up your brand of [insert type of miraculous problem-solving you offer here] in such a snappy sentence?