Preparedness - Newsletter Series Nº 2

what is it?
a state of readiness, especially for war or disaster.

why is it difficult? 
Many times people are blinded by confidence, feeling that they can wing it or go "off the cuff".  Sometimes they feel they don't have time to prepare or warm-up, unknowingly sabotaging themselves for the sake of efficiency.  The discipline to take the steps to be your best is incredibly difficult.  We all seem to be short on time, trying to be as efficient as possible and many times the first thing to be sacrificed is the act of preparing. 

As many of you watched your teams return from the long holiday weekend, the lethargy, the call apprehension, the fumbling around and the missed opportunities.  If you wondered if there was a better way, perhaps it's time to consider a formal and consistent warm-up regiment. 

Maybe it was you who was sluggish and ill-prepared for a pitch or a big meeting this week.  The same is true for anyone, regardless of your role in that you will simply perform better after taking the time to "warm-up" or practice before beginning a task.  Think about any professional athlete, musician, or performer.  Vocal exercises, batting practice, shooting around before a basketball game, stretching before going for a run, practicing lines before going on stage... The list goes on so why should business professionals be any different?

One of my former sales leaders would tell the story of Ray Allen of the Boston Celtics.  Ray would practice shooting for 3 hours before every game, even if the lights went out as you can see in the video to the right.  Why would this professional do such a thing?  Does he do it because that's what professionals do?  Or is this disciplined ritual of preparing what made him one of the most accurate three-point and free throw shooters in NBA history, a ten-time NBA All-Star, and winner of two NBA championships?

A few years ago my team and I were wrestling with this topic and how we could better prepare our sales team for their calls each day.  We had tried things such as objection ball toss for 20 minutes each day but it was hard to stay consistent, things would come up, schedules would get jostled and it ultimately would fall off.  It became more of a prescribed antidote than a daily vitamin like it should have been.  Without the warm-up, sales people would begin making calls in the morning and they were choppy, mumble filled, full of stumbles and probably their worst calls of the day.  In fact I would be willing to bet they didn't start having GOOD calls until after their 10th call.  Lots of wasted opportunities and if you are a business leader, wasted money on leads, management, training, and investment in systems.  You could definitely quantify the financial impact of your team not being prepared.  If you have 10 sales people each making at least 5 terrible calls each day that is close to 12,000 terrible calls per year for a small sales team yet most managers aren't even looking at the warm-up as a key component to improving their team's performance.   

We decided to try using technology to solve this issue.  With the help of LearnCore, a leader in the Sales Training and Video Coaching space, we recorded 60 different videos with different objections or scenarios.  We loaded them into the LearnCore platform and published warm-up videos to our team every morning for 12 weeks.  These daily warm-ups were to compliment our 12 week sales fundamentals training series and mirrored the topic of the week.  The LearnCore platform was great where in response to the morning warm-up video, the sales team members were to record their responses using the platform at their desks.  They would record and re-record until they were satisfied with their response, finally submitting it for their managers review and feedback.

The delivery was different but the idea was the same.  The sales team would warm-up or "practice" until they were satisfied and in our eyes as managers they were "warmed-up".

Through this method we were able to achieve the consistency that we needed to prepare our young professionals for their day of making sales calls.  The beauty of using a platform like LearnCore to publish the videos was that it didn't matter if the team was inside sales sitting in an office or field reps a thousand miles away, they could still participate.

I was working with another client who founded a startup with only 2 sales people in Minneapolis.  I was managing the team remotely from Los Angeles.  We tried something similar but a little more manual where their first 5 calls would be in the form of a mock call to me, with the 5th and final call being a mock voicemail.  I could literally hear the improvement from the first call to the 5th every time and this entire exercise took fewer than 10 minutes.