Jody Williamson

One of the things I used to tell myself all the time was that I didn’t have enough time. David Allen got my thinking straightened out on this with his book, “Getting Things Done”. It’s the best book I’ve ever read on getting more done in less time in a more organized and regular fashion.

When you're going over your pipeline and what you have stalled in there, one of the things to look at is pain. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out why opportunities stalled out, but it most likely has to do with pain.

Being in sales can be tough. The rejection, the uncertainty of the future, losing clients, prospecting, distractions, the complexity. I hate to give you all those to make it more negative, but I would suggest there's an alternative view you can take.

One of the core principles of the Sandler Selling System is the concept of pain. You know from psychology that eliminating pain in the present moment the strongest of all psychological motivators. Pain will get people to change.

When's the last time you scheduled Thinking Time?
Thinking time are chunks of time where you do nothing more than ‘look out the window’ (as Bill Gates called it). Blocking time out to just sit in a quiet spot (not in your office). The library, the beach, the middle of the forest with a journal. Somewhere where it’s just you and your thoughts. And getting those thoughts out of your head and onto paper.

Do you have a defined selling system? There’s a number of them that you can use. Of course, I'm biased to Sandler. I think it's the best process and system out there. But any system is only as good as you apply it.
The challenge can be when using and adapting the submarine to different sales situations. In the average sales conversation, you can use the submarine in order. Sometimes the pushback is "Well, that doesn't apply to my industry. It doesn't apply to what I sell."

One of my observations in the many years of coaching salespeople (and actually coaching myself), is that it's possible in the buyer-seller dance to fall into the category of being either too nurturing or too firm in your approach. Neither one of them is good.

Have you ever thought about how your environment affects your mindset, your behaviors, and your results? If you change your environment, you change your results and ultimately change your life. The challenge is, if you stay in the same environment for too long (especially if the environment is less than positive) you can find yourself ineffective in many different critical areas.

When you’re calling on the cast of characters in your sales process, you’re going to have multiple people involved. Multiple decision makers.
It’s key to have a better understanding of the different types of decision makers and their equally different buying motivations.

You've probably gotten a little too excited in the sales process before. You’ve gotten emotionally involved. Kind of like a Chris Farley in Tommy Boy, where he gets excited, doesn't think straight, and does his whole Tommy Boy thing.

Sometimes in the sales process, this can look like something we like to call Premature Presentation Syndrome.