Conscious Breathing, Selling Hot Dogs, Tips for New Sales Reps
Dive into the fifth issue of Hacking the Sale
Rob Wormley
- July 17, 2018
Conscious Breathing = More Sales?
Have you ever thought of breathing as a potential way to boost productivity at work? It’s not as popular as some of the other more well-known tips you’ll see in articles on productivity these days, but it may have merit.
According to Fast Company, we each take about 20,000 breaths a day. The author of the article writes, “as babies, we all take deep, relaxing breaths from our abdomen. If you’ve ever watched a small child sleeping, you’ve seen their belly rises and falls. But as we get older, the way we breathe changes.”
Stress seems to play a major role in how we breathe as adults. When you’re stressed, you tend to take short, fast breaths instead of deep breaths and only utilize the top third of your lungs. As a result of constant short breathing that only utilizes a portion of our lungs, our cognitive abilities go slack, we have trouble staying alert and connecting with others, and often just have less fun.
On the flip side, recent research suggests that deep, conscious breathing can have a positive impact on our bodies’ ability to deal with stress and anxiety, which can lead to improvements to our health, our happiness, and our daily productivity.
Want to learn how to breathe better? Here are some resources that can help:
- Successful Leaders Practice Conscious Breathing from Business Insider
- This Breathing Exercise Can Help You Stay Focused At Work from Fast Company
- Breathe. Exhale. Repeat: The Benefits of Controlled Breathing from New York Times
Teams vs Teaming
Do you know the difference between teams and teaming? I didn’t either before reading through the research and content published and spoken by Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School.
She coined the ‘teaming’ concept and argues that because the pace of change and the fluidity of most work structures today, success is not really about creating effective teams anymore, but instead about leading effective ‘teaming’.
What is teaming? Here’s how she describes it in her TED talk:
“Teaming is teamwork on the fly. It’s coordinating and collaborating with people across boundaries of all kinds — expertise, distance, time zone, you name it — to get work done.”
The basic idea behind teaming is this: when teams are encouraged to lean on the different expertise and skill sets of others, and when they are empowered to take risks, speak up, fail, and learn from those failures, they learn how to successfully collaborate and work together to solve problems and achieve a shared goal.
How does ‘teaming’ differ from the traditional concept of a team? Here’s how she explains it:
“Sports teams embody the definition of a team, the formal definition. It’s a stable, bounded, reasonably small group of people who are interdependent in achieving a shared outcome. You can think of teaming as a kind of pickup game in the park, in contrast to the formal, well-practiced team. Now, which one is going to win in a playoff? The answer is obvious. So why do I study teaming? It’s because it’s the way more and more of us have to work today. With 24/7 global fast-paced operations, crazy shifting schedules and ever-narrower expertise, more and more of us have to work with different people all the time to get our work done. We don’t have the luxury of stable teams.”
It’s an interesting concept and worth digging deeper into if you’re a manager of a team. She references a lot of different situations and scenarios throughout the TED talk to support her research about teaming, so if you’d like to learn more about it, watch the full 13-minute video here.
SALES GLOSSARY: Objection
In sales, an objection refers to a position, perspective, or feeling that a prospect has about your product, service, or sales pitch that prevents them from wanting to move forward and convert.
Hot Dog! That's a lot of Sales!
The Planet Money podcast episode we’re featuring in today’s issue is hosted by Nick Fountain and Robert Smith.
In episode #700: Peanuts And Cracker Jack, Nick and Robert travel to Fenway Park to shed light on another game happening underneath the bleachers that you have no idea exists at every ballpark you visit: it’s known simply as, “the pick.”
The “pick” is a meeting that happens at ballparks before games where food vendors get to decide what they’re going to sell for the night. To understand the complexities of this event, think of it as a sports draft.
Each vendor that sells food at a ballpark works off of a commission, so the more they sell in a night, the more they make. At the “pick,” vendors get to choose products based on seniority—so the guys who have been there for a really long time get to pick the best products.
There’s a lot of strategic thinking that happens when it comes to picking items, as you’ll learn in the episode. Vendors try to take various factors like weather into consideration when deciding whether to choose ice cold lemonade or hot chocolate. Naturally, everyone wants to pick products that they know will sell that night.
The right pick strategy can really pay off—in Boston’s Fenway Park, the top seller is Jose Magrass. He’s a legend who has been known to sell 500 hot dogs in a single night–that’s $2,750 worth of hot dogs!
It’s a fun episode for any baseball fan or salesperson who can appreciate the hustle and persistence of the men and women you see running up and down aisles all night at ball games—each one racing the clock and competing against fellow vendors to get as many sales as they can before the night ends.
LISTEN TIME: 25 MIN
Want to read the interview instead? Click here for the full transcript.
How to Succeed When You're New to Sales
If you’re hiring someone who has no prior experience as a salesperson, it’s important that you understand what it takes for them to be successful from day one. Here are seven things to keep in mind that will help boost new rep success:
- TRAINING – Is there a rep training program in place that can be leveraged first during onboarding and then on an ongoing basis?
- GOALS – Have short-term and long-term goals been clearly defined and agreed on?
- MENTORSHIP – Are new reps being paired with other experienced team members or managers to foster mentorship, establish trust, and strengthen team culture?
- PRACTICE – Are there opportunities and programs available that allow reps to practice scripts, conversations, and objection handling on a regular basis?
- ORGANIZATION – Are tools available that help reps stay organized and focused on completing tasks each day?
- CHECK-INS – Are you making time for regular check-ins to track progress, performance, preparedness, and rep happiness?
- NO FEAR – Are you encouraging new reps to not be afraid of failure? Are you helping them understand how to learn from mistakes and missed opportunities?
If you can’t answer YES to most of these questions, it’s possible that your newest reps aren’t being fully prepared to succeed in their new roles. If that’s the case, carve out some time to prioritize and address the areas from above that you think could help your team the most.
News Stories Worth Reading
40 Common Sales Objections & How to Respond
Looking to help your team with objection handling? This resource from HubSpot will run through 40 of the most common objections your reps will hear while talking to prospects and provide recommendations for how to overcome them.
You’re Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars Because of Poor Sales Onboarding
Are you worried that you’re not setting your sales reps up for success from the moment they walk through your doors for the first time? If you’re not thinking intentionally or strategically about sales onboarding, it could be costing you a lot of money. This resource from First Round offers tips on how to develop a more rigorous and productive sales onboarding program for your new hires.
Share your feedback!
We hope you enjoyed the fifth 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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