Visualize the Target in Sales

You were not meant to stare at a computer screen all day. If you wanted to be an accountant, you would be in that job, but you are a salesperson and so your gift today is the gift of vision.

Lists are great tools for productivity, but they rob you of the vital creativity you need to be a great salesperson. If you sit and stare at a computer screen, with endless rows of names and numbers scrolling past your eyes, you’ll quickly find yourself numb. Your brain attempts to find patterns that help you fill out another entry in a spreadsheet. When it comes time to call or email candidates, you’re stuck in list-building mode, hypnotized by the illusion of a large mass of? candidates.

That’s not how people work. That’s not even how good software works. It’s how dumb software works. Here is how you change your vision.

First - post pictures of people in and around your workspace. You have to remind yourself that you’re identifying people. You’ll need to change these regularly. It’s best if you don’t know them.

Before you begin any call, look at a picture, and imagine the person working in an office or at home or on the shop floor. This primes you to think in terms of where people work instead of seeing them as just leads.

Second, use maps. Google Maps is great because it’s essentially the new yellow pages. Type in the address of where you’re looking, and “search nearby” for similar companies. Try it. Search “creative agencies” in Los Angeles or “CNC manufacturers” in Columbus or “accountants” in Dallas. The Search Nearby tool gives you names and numbers (and websites), all of which are valuable in search strings. Do you know who works in those locations?? People.

Maps are visual clues to where people work and where companies cluster. All salespeople should have advanced search capabilities with maps (you can download Google Earth for free and it will create lists of pdf’s for you). Finally, use the map and people mind tricks to improve your search for incoming leads. What do you do when you get an incoming lead? Most people say, “call it.” I say, think to yourself that if one person is sending a lead, they probably are competing with other people who might be interested.

Or let's say it's not an incoming lead, but an entry in the database. What makes you think it's correct? Who else at that company (or who is now at that company) that might be a better fit for you? Where other salespeople smile and dial the same list of numbers, you can take half a second to think it through and call the right person - no matter what your database tells you.

You can’t think like that if you’re convinced the perfect search string will find available candidates. You can't think like that if you're allowing automation to throw numbers and names at you that have been stack ranked by Doug in Engineering. I mean - you've met Doug, right? Nice guy, talented with a server, but how does he know who you need to call?

You have to think like a human being - a flesh and blood mortal who works with people inside an office. They belong to associations. They network for their career. They have lives and families and friends and bosses - and until you've embraced and sought to understand that richness of their lives - they'll never be more than a KPI you're trying to hit to feel like you did something that day.

Lift your vision, just a little. Visualize prospects as people and companies, and you’ll find that sales gets much easier.

#BonusTip: your communications will get better when you're writing people and not leads. The reason is simple - you're not writing in a way that you think is professional - you're actually writing to them.

Want to learn more about how to train your sales and recruiting staff to get results? Book an appointment with Jim Durbin to see what he can do for their vision. ?