Progress is Better Than Perfection

 Progress is better than perfection

And welcome to the Sell the Sizzle podcast. This is the show. If you want to sell an idea, a product, or a service, we're gonna share sales techniques with you so that you can be a sizzling success. Let's go. Hi, it's Mick Holly and welcome to another episode. This one is called Progress is better than perfection What do I mean by that?

Well, sometimes we just just don't feel as though we can get started on something and I'm reminded of a quote from my famous mentor Not actually, but I've read his books ,Zig Ziglar And he said,

"you don't have to be great at something to start. But you have to start to be great at something."

I mean, such profound words from Zig.

And often we don't, we don't start. We don't start a new sales campaign. We don't start a phone call. We don't... Start at trying to get into a new account. Why? Because we're fearful. We want to be perfect. We want to wait until we've got our message crafted, our presentation pristine, our delivery delightful.

We don't want to be embarrassed and we worry what others will think if we stumble and we fall because we're not perfect. We're not rehearsed. We're not ideal. And, I, uh, Sometimes we just get ourselves into a rut where we just can't take any action. And so I want to give you a couple of quick tips today.

This will be a short podcast on being able to move forward. Because, you know, small hinges can open big doors. So a small change can have a profound impact. And here's one that I wanted to share with you that somebody told me just a few weeks ago. And it made such an impression on me and it's really helped me.

You know, move forward. And that is live in your calendar. Do not live in your email. Now think about it. Email is everybody sending you things, right? You, you, you are, who's in charge? Whose agenda is it? When you go into your email box in the morning, there's a list of emails. That's somebody else's agenda.

That's what's important for somebody else. salesperson, rainmaker, you need to be in charge of your own destiny. You need to be in control. And so what you really want is those you want to be focused on what's coming up in your calendar. You want to make your calendar full. You don't need your inbox and your email to be full.

You want to have sales meetings, sales pitches, um, contract negotiations in your calendar. So fill up your. Calendar. So when you, then the night before your productive day, what I would, what I do is I list down all the things that I've got to do the following day. And then what I do is I list the three most important of those.

And at least one of them has got to be, you know, revenue generating, it's got to be client facing, you've got to be trying to close some deals or move a relationship forward. And so you put those into your calendar, actually go into your calendar and put it in there. Mark out the times when you're actually going to do that.

For me, lately, it's been, been trying to get to some new prospects. And, you know, getting in front of people, doing cold calling can sometimes be a little... Hmm, what should I say? It's a little fretful and you just don't think anybody wants to talk to you. Nobody wants to pick up the phone. You get any, get invoicemails all the time.

But you know, what I did was I put into my calendar, you know, today I'm going to make 50 calls. And I blocked out times in the morning and times in the late afternoon when I was going to make those calls. And every day I went through it and I, you know, I had a list of people that I prepared the day before that I was going to call.

I get to and I cycled through that list and on some days made 50 calls and maybe spoke to one person. Another days, the floodgates open and I might speak to 12 people and I advance those meetings, get those meetings in my calendar and that moves things on in the, in the sale. So you, but you've just got to be, you've got to be relentless.

You've got to be in control and in charge because in the email, right? Often I think salespeople think that they're customer service agents. If I wait for my customer to ask me questions, I'll respond. I'll deal with the question. I'll think I'm a, I'm a great person and they'll buy from me. Now that's a customer service function.

Right. The sales, sales function is you have to add value. You've got to identify incremental value that the customer will get from using your product or service. And every day you need to push, you need to push your customers so that they're uncomfortable. You need to get them off the dime and get them moving.

So what you do as a Rainmaker is you add value, you add pace. And add direction. So here's what I want you to take away from this episode. Every evening, the day before the end of your work day, write down those three things that you must do, and then schedule them in your calendar, live in your calendar, not your inbox.

And every day make a little bit of incremental progress, make those calls, make those connections, keep on doing it relentlessly time after time, and that progress will move you forward ultimately towards perfection. So I hope you enjoyed the quick episode this week and I'll see you next time.