How to Have Your Most Productive Year Ever (Part 2)

Have Your Most Productive Year Ever (Part 2) Yesterday, we identified the difference between the philosophies of hunting and farming as they relate to sales. Sales, like farming, is a repeatable process of events, timing and patience. Some of the events are within your control and some, like the weather in farming, are completely out of your control. If you effectively follow and implement the steps in the proper order and sequence, you expect to be able to harvest your crop or grow your business. In sales, the general steps are: • Identify a prospect • Develop a relationship • Identify a need • Create a solution • Present the solution • Implement the solution • Repeat Admittedly, that’s a gross oversimplification of the sale process. RAB teaches the 7-Steps to Selling Success. In farming, there are clearly defined “seasons” based on the calendar and the weather. For salespeople, the sales cycle is the growing season. If the salesperson plants enough seeds and plans for possible damage, she can harvest a good crop. In retail or many business-to-business sales, the “harvest time” was the holidays. The few weeks after the holidays is a great time to be preparing to pull weeds (dead accounts), planting seeds (prospecting) and preparing the soil (researching your prospects). Do you have your plan in place for 2021? Have you begun to take the steps necessary to have your best crop ever? The news about the economy is getting better every day. Research has shown consumers in a buying frenzy based on pent-up demand from the pandemic. If you want to use the farming model for sales, you need to focus on two main things: 1) The number of qualified prospects in your sales funnel, and (2) their status in the funnel. In other words, how many seeds in the ground, and how are they growing? The good news about sales is that the “growing season” isn’t defined by the calendar or the weather. If you find yourself with too few prospects, you can always add more. If the prospects in your funnel aren’t growing fast enough, you can create strategies to move them closer to buying or weed them out. The steps to being successful in sales and farming are predictable and repeatable. By implementing the farming philosophy, you can begin the journey of having your most productive and fruitful year ever.