Clock Battles, Empathy, Keeping Salespeople Motivated
Dive into the third issue of Hacking the Sale
Rob Wormley
- June 22, 2018
Clock battles
“Gosh, where did the time go?”
It’s a rhetorical question that we’ve all asked ourselves at one point or another.
You know the situation: you’re working through your list of to-do’s, busy making calls, or heads down on a project that you know needs to get done when you happen to take a glance at the clock.
It’s then that you realize you’re out of time for the day. You have to get home to your partner, to your kids, to your friends, to your hobbies.
My question for you is this: do you know how your time is being spent? Most of us have a general idea, but few take the time to really analyze how we’re using every minute of our day.
Laura Vanderkam is one person who decided to find out. Her goal was to learn how efficient and meaningful she was being with her time. In 2015 she started tracking her entire day in 30-minute blocks—from 5 a.m. to 4:30 a.m—in a spreadsheet. She continued this habit consistently for more than three years!
She wrote about what she learned from her time tracking exercise in a piece published on Fast Company.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“While I love to read, I had been telling myself that reading wasn’t a huge priority during such a “busy” phase of my life. When I started logging my time, my youngest child was just three months old. Everyone knows working moms don’t have time to read, right? Except I did read. I read 327 hours that first year, which is almost an hour a day. Unfortunately, I was using that time unintentionally, reading whatever was easiest–usually gossip and fashion magazines that showed up due to the magic of auto-renewal, and a shocking number of online comment sections. Once I knew this time existed, I vowed to use it more mindfully.”
Are you in a constant battle with the clock? Are you mystified by how fast the day goes by and how little time you seem to have to accomplish things at work and at home? Make a goal to track every minute of your day for the next 30 days to find out how you’re using the time you have—you might be surprised at what you learn about yourself.
Let empathy be your biggest advantage
In sales, the ability to empathize with others can give you a big advantage.
Empathy is defined as:
“The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”
As the world becomes more automated and more reliant on technology, being able to genuinely connect with, understand, and relate to leads and customers on a human, person-to-person level is more important than ever.
Here are a few resources that can help you harness the power of empathy in your future sales interactions:
Discover Your Biggest Business Advantage — Empathy from Forbes
21 Empathy Statements That Put Your Prospect at Ease from HubSpot
Why Genuine Empathy Is Good For Business from Fast Company
SALES GLOSSARY: Touches
In sales, touches typically refer to the number of times you need to engage with a contact in order to qualify them as lead or convert them into a paying customer. Touchpoints are the interactions that occur between you and your prospect as you attempt to qualify and move them down your funnel. Examples include phone calls or voicemails, emails, live chat conversations, demos, or in-person meetings.
The Wacky Used Car Salesman: an Origin Story
Planet Money is a podcast hosted by Karen Duffin and a few other journalists from NPR.
In episode #836: The Rational Madness Of The Used Car Salesman, Karen sits down with another podcaster named Flora Lichtman to find out why used car commercials and advertisements have historically been—and in some cases, continue to be—so wacky and over-the-top.
In the interview, Duffin and Lichtman play a number of examples and try to determine who is actually responsible for this style of advertising that we all know too well.
It turns out, it can all be traced back to one person: Earl Muntz, otherwise known as Madman Muntz.
In the 1940’s, Muntz was looking for an edge. He teamed up with an advertising mogul named Michael Shore, and together, they developed the madman persona as a way to stand out, be more memorable, and sell more cars. According to the episode, it’s a strategy that seemed to pay off and one that quickly spread to used car dealerships all around the country.
It’s a fun listen for anyone who can appreciate the idea of going the extra mile to win the sale, and for those of you who love learning more about the history and evolution of sales and salespeople in the U.S.
LISTEN TIME: 18 MIN
Want to read the interview instead? Click here for the full transcript.
Learn How to Keep Your Sales Team Motivated
As a sales leader, one of your many jobs is to keep your team happy and motivated in their roles. When they succeed, you succeed.
If you’ve been struggling lately to keep your reps motivated, remember the 5 P’s:
- Pay – Offer competitive pay and give your employees the commissions, bonuses, and raises they deserve.
- Praise – Show appreciation whenever you see your reps going the extra mile and really knocking it out of the park.
- Perks – Offer special perks that will keep your team happy. Take them out to lunch every so often, pay for a monthly subscription you know they’ll appreciate and use (ex. Spotify), pay transportation or phone bills, and throw parties when they hit their goals.
- Purpose – Always make sure your reps understand the purpose behind the work they are doing. Help them see the bigger picture.
- Personal Growth – Give them opportunities to grow in their career and as individuals. Let them have more ownership and allow them to make and learn from mistakes.
Got another sales team motivation tip to add to this list? Reply to this email and tell us what’s been working well for you and your team lately.
News Stories Worth Reading
Incorporating Video into Your Sales Outreach Emails
Are your prospecting emails not hitting the mark? If you want to boost engagement and drive action, it might be time to try something new. In April, video hosting company Wistia decided to change up their outreach strategy and started adding personalized videos to the emails they were sending to leads. The results? A 140% higher click rate! Click here to read through the 6 steps you need to take to start incorporating video in your outreach emails.
7 Ways to Bolster the Confidence of Your Sales Reps
We gave you tips earlier in this email about keeping your sales team motivated, but what can you do as a manager to boost their confidence? This article offers seven actionable ideas that you can use to help your salespeople feel more confident and be more successful in their roles.
When was the last time you evaluated or updated the sales training program that you have new hires go through? If you’re actively working on scaling your team and struggling to ensure consistency across your reps, this article can help. In it, Jeff Winters outlines four practice-based training methods that he recently adopted to boost team performance and increase sales.
Share your feedback!
We hope you enjoyed the third issue of Hacking the Sale.
If you have any feedback on this edition or want to send article or topics ideas our way, just reply to this email. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
// Rob Wormley and the team at Rambl
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