Rounding up the latest in sales research and innovation.
August 17, 2022
By Adam Rosa
It’s time for Maestro’s news roundup, and this month we are talking engines. Not carburetors or a V6 in the 1965 Thunderbird (don’t @ me, I don’t actually know what V6 means and I’m sure it wasn’t in the 1965 Thunderbird). We are talking about something I do know about—we’re talking personal engines.
Your personal engine is the thing that gets you going. The thing that gets you out of bed, the thing that kicks you into overdrive and says, this sale isn’t lost yet, you just need to try one more approach. Your engine is your battery and taking care of it is how you motivate yourself to work and succeed in sales. If you know how to care for it, polish it, and make sure it runs smoothly, everything else is just a matter of letting it turn the wheels.
The first thing to think about is what gets your engine running. Typically, people think of their passions—writing, sports, money. When it comes to work, we have all gone through those initial bursts of passion—that exciting new assignment, the new position we worked hard for—but those bursts of passion don’t last forever. We need to know how to run our engine even if we feel our battery is getting low. What do we do when our passions wane?
A recently released book, Unfollow Your Passion, answers just that. The best way to fuel our engines with passion is…not pursuing a passion. Instead, author Terri Trespicio recommends following engagement and pursuing mastery. Work to be an expert at everything you do, and the passion will follow. Your engine will never die. Adapting like this, learning how to change how we look at ourselves, is the best approach in sales to keep energy fresh. If we can constantly grow to find what works best, our engines will stay the well-oiled machines we need them to be.
Once your engine is up and running, anyone with an old clunker knows there’s a lot of maintenance. Just because it runs doesn’t mean it will keep running. Human engines are the same, they need food and sleep, but the one thing people seem to always neglect are those darned emotions. So, how can you meet all your engine’s maintenance needs?
The answer is to focus on yourself and create the right environment for your engine. Of the many stats in HubSpot’s piece on how your mood can impact your sales, not so surprising is that 67% of salespeople feel close to burnout. We work hard day in and day out to close sales, adding countless miles to the odometer.
A more surprising stat is that a whopping 43% of salespeople feel their workplace is toxic, which leads to less productivity and, more importantly, plain old bad feelings for everyone. You wouldn’t put your car engine in a vat of acid, so why put yourself somewhere toxic? Little things like showing appreciation, even for small wins, go a long way, so don’t forget to do it for your coworkers, employees, and above all else, yourself.
Car junkies are all about updating their cars—adding bigger wheels, making their engines faster or louder. It’s the same in sales; the best salespeople are always looking to improve. The very best do one specific thing to make those updates: they compare themselves. Yes, you read that right, these people do something you are told from a young age not to do, they compare! But what they don’t do is simply compare themselves to others.
These people compare themselves to…themselves. They look at different ways to measure success, and they do it often. They figure out how productive they are, whether it’s looking at their activity, revenue, or deals closed. Why? Because that’s what keeps them going. You can always try to be better than you were yesterday, last week, or last year. Competing against your own productivity will motivate you to constantly refine your process and continually learn more. Your engine will be running faster every day.
The last thing your engine needs is its happy home. It’s one thing to have the right engine, but it needs the right place to thrive. The engine of a Prius won’t work in a NASCAR vehicle, and it doesn’t work the other way either. (But wouldn’t that be fun to see—a tiny smart car going 200 MPH?) You need to figure out where your sales engine will succeed. This starts with planning, which often can be completely wrecked (car pun intended) simply by poor targeting. If you have a successful plan but do not pitch to the right people, you have no plan.
Developing your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) is vital to your plan. An ICP isn’t just a ragtag tossed-together idea in your head of who you want to sell to. It involves using quantitative data to match buyers to numbers, and then remembering they are not just numbers but people, so treat them as such. Get your engine the right car, get your pitches to the right audience, and make sure you’re efficient with your time so as not to waste your energy.
At the end of the day, your engine is what drives your success. Here at Maestro Group, we’ve created an extensive list of workshops to hone you or your team’s engine to drive sales. We know your engine is what keeps you moving forward, helping you get better and making sure you get the sales you want. You do that by showing it the respect it needs, and I promise you will feel better, do better, and be a better salesperson and person-person.
Get your engine revved with one of Maestro’s workshops, such as DRIVE, our proprietary information-gathering framework that helps keep your deal (and your pistons) in motion. Reach us a mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information.
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