White Collar Work, Blue Collar Work Ethic

Sales has one raw characteristic that cannot be ignored. Shear will power can lead to success.

Grant Cardone says “Go the extra mile, there is no one on it.”

This is an absolute truth. Doing more activity than anyone else will produce results. Even with the lowest skillsets, the seller doing 10x the activity will tops the sales charts.

Improving skillsets will improve results. But those improvements will never equal the results produced by adding activity. There is a science to sales that can not be avoided.

Walk the Walk.

For those that follow me on LinkedIn, you may have noticed a trend of recruiting posts. That is because recruiting and sales training are now what I do most. I recruit to 1099 sales positions, so the recruiting is very much selling. Just in a different arena.

This past week gave me some interesting insights. A week before I had a job post that did really well. On a $15 spend, I got 71 applicants. I only made it through about 30 of those applicants in that first week.

So I saved the others for this week. I am committed to contacting everyone. This turned out to be a big mistake.

Shorty after I started dialing, I could tell that I had waited too long. The conversations felt stale and the yes’s almost felt forced.

The feeling wasn’t wrong. The show rate on those interviews was around 25% and no one committed to a second interview.

Based on that gut feeling, I made a decision to put up two new job posts and double the activity for the week. After several 12 hours days, the trend reversed. I ended the week with an 50% overall show rate.

Morale of the story is that sheer hard work was the difference maker. Sure I made a change with the job posts, but the posts would not have worked if I did not commit to the activity.

New vs. Old.

The freshness of the ‘leads’ in this situation also was interesting. In our industry, we are 100% outbound with our sales. We do not have SDRs or lead gen.

However, our pipelines can still get stale even when we are moving leads from cold to contract. This is because we do not have an influx of new activity to the pipelines. Nothing beats new activity, new leads, or new sales.

I love follow up. It is where the money is at. But nothing solves problems like new activity.

If things feel stale, mix it up. Do not stop following up. Just add in some new activity and new leads. Keep things fresh.

Be Weary of Microscopes.

Sales metrics cannot be viewed under a microscope. The outcome of a day rarely matters when looking at metrics. A bad day will not derail a quarter.

Neither will a bad week for that matter. But a collection of bad days and bad weeks will.

The most important metric to watch is pipeline health. Is the pipeline moving? Is it being filled back up?

If you are seeing bad days and bad weeks and the pipeline is looking rough, there are going to be a lot of white knuckles in the quarter. Sales really is pipeline over everything. And activity is what builds the pipeline.

Find good metrics to follow for the near term and the long term. Make sure the short term metrics relate to the long term or your coaching will be wasted. The best way to respond to a bad day is with more activity.

Take Aways.

The suits look good, but they should be covering sweat and calluses. Looks do not sell. Hard work, determination and will power sells. All the training and learning in the world will never outperform shear activity.

It’s the best thing about sales. Effort is always rewarded. Do not get comfortable. Comfort drains pipelines. Get out there and find the sales.