The
Masters: Sales and Golf
Three
Disciplines to Mastery
By
Jeffrey Hansler, CSP
I
took up golf 18 months ago at the urging of a friend. I use
to think golf was a silly sport about grown people chasing a
little white ball around all day - and now I just wish I
could master it.
The
more I practice and play the sport, the more I see the
similarities to the art of selling. While it's the nuances
that the masters struggle with, it's three primary
disciplines that provide the opportunity for
excellence and ultimately mastery in golf and sales.
The
first disciple is skill excellence and the awareness of how
to achieve it under all conditions. In golf, this discipline
is a repeatable swing that can be carried onto the golf
course from the driving range. The swing is the foundation
of every other aspect of golf. It's how the golfer
'communicates' with the ball. While simple in concept, there
are many elements required to create a repeatable swing:
grip on the club, stance, balance, back swing, tempo, and
the swing plane. Each element requires a learning and
familiarity process not only for the swing itself, but how
to retain that swing under different conditions and on
different terrain. The beauty is that each element can be
worked on separately. Finally, as one begins to earn a
repeatable swing based on a standard, the work begins on
finding your own unique swing: something that can't be
taught or learned - only played.
In
sales, the first discipline is an ability to build
persuasive communication passages that can be carried into
the sales meeting. A command of persuasive communication
skills is the foundation of every other aspect of sales.
While also simple in concept, persuasive communication has
many elements that create the opportunity for guiding the
sale: agreement language, flexing personality style and
frames, the ability to ask effective questions, and
understanding what drives the decision-making process. Each
element requires a learning and familiarity process so that
the salesperson can focus on the customer. Each element can
be worked on separately and ultimate proper execution will
be based on unique personal adjustments.
The
second discipline is the establishment of and measurement
against targets. Tiger Woods was once asked by a golf fan,
"Tiger, I hit a 100 balls a day and I'm not getting
better. What's the trick?". Tiger's response,
"Hitting a 100 balls a day won't help. Hitting a 100
balls a day to a target 150 - 200 yards out and measuring
your shots to how close they get to the target will make you
better." Without targets for both activities and
scoring how can you possibly determine whether you are
improving or not in golf or in sales.
Even
if it is true that golfer's are just as interested in
tracking their golf scores as salespeople are their sales
levels, unless both have measurements prior to the game,
neither can expect much improvement. Measuring all activity
against prior results is a critical aspect of determining if
you are improving. For sales, it's more than measuring
closing ratios, sales quantity, and sales value. It's about
measuring your ability to pre-think a sales call,
pre-planning your questions in response to expected
objectives, and measuring the activities required to even
gain the sales appointment.
If
you only play golf and don't practice, it's unlikely your
game will change much. It's the same with sales, it's not
just measuring what happens based on sales calls, it's about
measuring the activities that lead to each sales calls: how
time is spent, sorting through leads, generating interest
for sales meetings, etc. Each one of these activities is the
equivalent to practicing on the driving range and preparing
for the 'game'.
The
final discipline is an intimate knowledge of the process. In
golf, it's about bringing your driving range game to the
course to determine if what you've learned holds up under
pressure. In sales, it's about consciously using the skills
you've practiced and learned and measuring the results with
a multitude of prospects. It's a mindset of commitment at
all levels and being honest with yourself about the results.
It's about keeping what works and changing what needs to be
changed.
It's
been said by some of the best golfers in the world, that if
you believe in the result and are willing to commit to the
actions for the result, the odds are in your favor of
attaining the result. And if you don't get the expected
result, then honoring that is the best thing you can do to
prepare for future improvement. Improvement is a commitment
to change that which is not getting you the results you have
targeted. If you do not change the actions of the past, you
will not get different results, which is why it is so
important to both golfers and salespeople to be honest about
what works and what doesn't.
There
are two aspects regarding change. First, (and I never
noticed this until I started playing the sport) pro golfers
'replay' the swing after they hit a ball. What they are
doing is replaying the swing if it was a good swing and
'playing' the swing they wanted to make if their actual shot
wasn't what they wanted. Second, they are always working on
their swing and making small adjustments because a
repeatable swing is more of an illusion than a reality
because each day we are different. Mastery is the ability to
find the swing that grows with us. A salesperson needs to
make similar adjustments to their persuasive communication
to accommodate the state they are in and the current
conditions.
The
challenge is to know your skill excellence, be it golf or
sales, and know whether you executed the way you planned or
not. In this way, you can begin to understand the difference
between what was delivered less than perfectly and so must
be practiced, and what was delivered as practiced and needs
to be changed to gain a more desired result. In either case,
under the pressure of the moment there is an enormous
internal drive to do what has been done previously. Maybe
it's habit or fear or instinct, it doesn't really matter.
What does matter is being able to change that typical
response to a response more likely to generate the results
you want. This is why practice with specific measurable
targets is critical.
Learning
is a step by step process, and my golf instructor would
never work on more than one thing at a time and our lesson
was never set in stone. The lesson was determined after I
hit several balls and it became clear on the one change that
would contribute to my overall success in the immediate
future. Throughout the instruction process, he was always
adapting his knowledge to my personal style, movements, and
abilities, thereby giving me the opportunity to develop an
intimate knowledge with the process. The same is true with
learning the art of persuasive communication and sales.
One
final thought, on your journey to mastery. There are many
methods of learning, tools for learning, and philosophies
for learning golf and sales. Some core ideas are being
questioned lately and I see it as more of an opportunity to
develop your own personal style. Hey, batter, batter...
© 2007 Jeffrey Hansler All rights
reserved
#
# # # #
Jeffrey
Hansler is a professional speaker, author, and consultant.
He is a frequent speaker at association events, creating change with communication
and is the
author of Sell Little Red Hen! Sell! He can be reached at jhansler@oxfordco.com.
Click
here for a .pdf version of this page
Click
here to access our article request form to secure
permission to use or reprint this article
©
2005 Jeffrey Hansler All rights reserved |
