Why "Winging It" NEVER Works

In this blog I’m going to address both frontline salespeople as well as leaders and I’m going to tell you that I believe that more than 80% of you (trainers included) are…

…COMPLETELY BLOWING IT!

Do I have your attention now? Good. Let me explain what I’m talking about. (This blog subject has been boiling up inside of me for some time, LOL!)

A month or so back I was doing a personal coaching session with a really nice and intelligent man. Let’s call him “Rob”. Rob had just begun our 8-week CAP Equation Frontline Sales Coaching program. It’s comprised of live + recorded teleseminar sessions as well as a personal coaching aspect.

If you’re a frontline salesperson or sales trainer, you can click on the link below and take a look at the program: https://t.co/8ssHONjwkE

Rob was accessing his personal coaching session that we also offer. He told me he’d sold professionally before. He indicated that he knew what he was doing and wasn’t necessarily lacking confidence, but in the same breath he mentioned he was quite frustrated. I dug further—asked more questions—and learned that he’d just joined a new company and was having challenges getting business owners to sit down with him.

In other words, he was crashing and burning at appointment setting and I could sense he was beginning to run out of gas.

I started chipping away at the problem, assuming he was working from a battle-tested appointment setting script. I inquired if he was getting to the point quickly. In other words, was he was asking for an opportunity to meet with the prospect within the first minute of the conversation (which all pros do). He was vague in his answer, so I asked him if he felt he was trying to sell his products and services instead of simply selling the business owner on the time to meet with him. (This is called data dumping) Again, his answer was uncertain. I quizzed him…could he tell me what the 3 most common objections were, and did he have at least three ways of rebutting each of them.

Rob mumbled, “no” and became quiet.

I then stopped assuming anything and asked him to summarize what his script or appointment setting template sounded like—I asked him to read it to me. He went silent. Then responded.

“I’m not working from a script,” he stammered. “I guess I’m just winging it…I say whatever I think will get me the appointment.”

You see the problem here, right? He was jumping off the building with no parachute, hoping there’d be a soft place to land somewhere down below. If John was playing darts, this would be the equivalent of him putting on a blindfold, spinning around a dozen times until he was good and dizzy and then tossing the darts in some random direction.

He was never going to hit the target, let alone any part of the dartboard. In fact, he’d be lucky if he didn’t put someone’s eye out.

He was winging it for sure—saying whatever clever thing popped into his head. Rob was failing, and worse, he was trying something just a little bit different each time he picked up the phone or made a face-to-face approach. He was dizzy, throwing those darts wildly into the air. After I got done biting my tongue, I advised John to do the following, and I’d also advise you to consider the following 4 steps if you’re winging it:

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https://www.thecapequation.com/why-winging-it-never-works-4-steps-that-fix-this/