9
perfect the process
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
Plenty of people believe that Henry Ford invented the automobile. He didn’t, of course. It had been around for almost two decades by the time he founded Ford Motor Company. His genius was in his assembly line.
But he didn’t invent the assembly line, either. Breaking down a product into its component parts and having a person specialize in creating that one piece (instead of building the whole thing, like a blacksmith or a carpenter would have in medieval times) was what launched the Industrial Revolution in England.
In fact, some historians point to the Venetian Arsenal as possibly the first industrial-scale “assembly line,” creating an entire warship in just a day . . . in Venice of 1104. For those of you at home, that’s one year shy of eight centuries before the first Model T rolled out the door.
So why, then, is Henry Ford regarded as one of the greatest businesspeople and industrialists ever? How did he beat out dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of other automobile manufacturers to become the titan he was? How is he to this day still among the top ten richest people who ever lived in modern history?
His secret? He never stopped improving his process.
He constantly tinkered with every facet of his manufacturing operations, trying to wring just an extra thirty seconds out of this or an extra two minutes out of that. Everything he did was designed for efficiency—then disassembled and reassembled for even more. He had every moment and even every movement down to an exact science.
In fact, as a rep from Castrol, my dad worked in a Ford plant. Even in the early 2000s, Ford went through the effort of training assembly line workers to pull the exact number of bolts out of a bucket that they’d need for each task. That way, they wouldn’t waste precious seconds reaching back into the bin.
If most salespeople were to manufacture cars the way they approach sales, they’d say, “Look, we’re just gonna put all these machines in a room—just wherever they’ll fit—and we’ll just figure it out for each car as we go along.”
They go into a meeting, pick up the phone, or go to a networking event and figure they’ll just wing it. They may have even assembled a hodgepodge process that works for them and produces just enough results to keep them limping along. In that case, their attitude is “This is the best I can do, and if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”
If Ford had had that attitude, we probably wouldn’t even know his name. He’d be a footnote in the annals of the automobile industry. But because of his focus—some might almost say obsession—with process and efficiency, he kept getting incrementally better.
With some changes, you may jump ahead by miles instead of inches. For me, the big leap was seeing the sales process for what it is: a big assembly line. Learning how to use stories to sell, how to turn features into tangible benefits, asking the right questions, figuring out the assumptive sell—those lessons propelled me past all the other salespeople to become the number one salesperson in the entire company. That’s how I started closing one in every fifty sales calls, then one in every twenty, then one in ten, then one in five. Figuring out which questions were more effective or how to best tell one particular story—and, especially, the moral of how this product is awesome and will fix their problem—allowed me to incrementally improve how I could close one in four, then one in three . . . and sometimes even nine in ten.
I can’t claim credit for any of the building blocks I’ve presented in this book. As I said, I pieced them together from YouTube videos when I was eighteen years old. You can go out and find plenty of sales books on each aspect. I didn’t invent the idea of continuous improvement. I’ve just figured out that it works in introverts’ sales, too.
If you read this book and use it to get more customers, great. It will have been worth your time. But if you stop once you get out of the hole you’re in, then you’ve tapped into only a fraction of the benefit. You don’t just want to learn to sell—you want to learn how to keep getting better.
DO AN EVAL ON YOURSELF. REALLY.
Your sales system should constantly evolve, constantly improve, and constantly be the center of your business’s attention. The day you neglect your sales system is the day you start sliding back to where you started.
The first step to improving your process: Make sure to actually use the process. When my sales guys started seeing a dip in their sales, my first question was: “Did you stick to the script?”
“Oh, yeah, absolutely!”
“Great! Role-play with me.”
They would immediately give me this Oh, crap! look. They’d do it. Inevitably, some parts were out of order, some were skipped, some were summarized.
I’d say, “Okay, go home and read it tonight. That’s exactly what you say to your customers tomorrow.”
They’d go back to the exact wording on the script and their sales would pick right back up to normal. Circumstances hadn’t changed; they were just running a suboptimal version of the system.
You need to do something similar. Every time you get off the phone, get back to your car, or go back behind the counter, stop and evaluate the sales experience. Don’t wait until the end of the day or the end of the week. The longer you take to review the sale, the more details you’ll miss and forget. Do an analysis while the incident is still fresh in your mind.
First, don’t make excuses about why you didn’t make the sale:
“They weren’t going to buy anyway.”
“They’d already made up their mind before I opened my mouth.”
“They weren’t my ideal customer.”
“They were probably more trouble than they were worth.”
“I was just off my game today.”
“It’s just that time of the year.”
“People just don’t buy when it’s raining.”
“They probably couldn’t afford it.”
My personal favorite: “It was just an unlucky day.”
The specific excuse you use may be true, and you’re not ever going to win 100 percent of sales, but you can always improve your odds of success. The better your sales system, the less those other factors matter.
However, blaming those external factors will never help you get better. When you do that, you give up control. You’re saying that you couldn’t have done anything to affect the outcome, that the results were destined to happen. You subconsciously admit that you’re powerless to change things.
On the other hand, I don’t want you to obsess over a sale, either. You shouldn’t beat yourself up and feel that you’re a terrible salesperson. Neither of these extremes helps you objectively evaluate the sale.
Instead, ask yourself:
1. Did I stick to the script?
2. What could I have possibly done better?
Let each sale you miss clue you in on what you could do better.
ONE THING AT A TIME
In a true scientific experiment, the scientists—be they chemists, psychologists, statisticians, or whoever—alter only one variable at a time. Otherwise, they can never be sure which change produced the results they saw. If your doctor gave you five different treatments, how would you know which one cured you? If you started taking five different medications and developed an allergy, how would you know which one caused it?
When you begin succeeding at sales, you’ll probably begin to get excited. You’ll begin to see all the things you could be doing differently or better. You’ll be tempted to make all kinds of changes. But you can never measure yourself or your process’s improvement if you don’t have a baseline and if you change more than one variable at a time.
When you first put your sales process together, everything is new. As you move forward, most of your changes should be major ones: introducing stories to sidestep objections or figuring out how to establish credibility.
As you progress and your process becomes more and more reliable, most of your changes will become more minor: the way you phrase a new question to uncover a pain point or how you introduce a particular story. When things don’t work, go back to your basic process, reestablish your baseline, and then keep on moving forward toward perfection.