Climb Every Mountain, Clinch Every Sale
Have you ever heard of Ed Viesturs? He is a famous mountain climber, the first American to climb the fourteen highest mountains in the world—they’re all over 8,000 meters—without using oxygen bottles. How does he do it? (We’ll set aside another question here, namely why in the world he does it.)
He plans each ascent backwards. That is, when he begins his process, he starts at the peak. Viesturs figures out when he has to leave the summit to get back to his last camp while it is still light out and by his standards safe. Once he’s got that set in his mind, he then—and only then—decides when he starts his ascent.
Working Backwards
You can’t have a battle plan until you understand what constitutes a win.
Good salespeople first try to figure out what their goals are before they meet with a client or prospect. Usually it’s to close a deal of some sort—but not always. Sometimes it’s just to keep an old customer from switching suppliers or get her to increase her order or use more of your product line.
In almost all cases for almost all product lines, you are going to have to make a presentation before you reach your goal. But how you make the presentation and who you make it to requires research and meetings and perhaps more meetings before you actually take out that laptop.
Keeping the Proper Focus
You established your goal. Working backwards, you determined how to reach the goal and now you plan to move forward, keeping ever focused on closing the sale. Right? — Wrong.
Your focus has to be on getting to the next step. This is a process. Focusing on the end may put you in a position where you miss something important in the here and now.
Also, if there’s a small detour on this road, thinking too far ahead can be discouraging.
For example, let’s say your ultimate goal is to sign up this new client, a large manufacturer. If you can convince the prospect to use your product or service (whatever it is) you stand to reap a multimilliondollar order. In that tiny little portion of your head where greed resides, you’ve already started to see little pictures of tropical drinks and romantic strolls with your spouse along Waikiki Beach.
But you’ve been in the business long enough not to count your chickens before someone signs on the dotted line. So you’ve kind of thought about what your presentation should be. You work your way backwards, to your first meeting with the prospect. You imagine the questions you will ask to gather the information you need to put together the presentation that will get you to Honolulu and perhaps a week or so on one of the outer islands.
So, what good is all that daydreaming, all your concentration on signing the deal, if you can’t get past that first meeting? So while you certainly want to keep your ultimate goal in mind, what you have to concentrate on is getting to the next step in this process, whatever the next step might be. It might be a second meeting with the purchasing manager. It might be a visit to the company’s plants for meetings with your product’s end users. It might be a trip to corporate headquarters to sit with (and pick the brain of) the senior vice president of sales.
Whatever it is, that’s what you have to focus on. In 2006, Ed Viesturs published a book about his climbing adventures titled “No Shortcuts to the Top”. In analogy: “No Shortcuts to the Sale.” Because that’s the main point here: You have to work thoroughly and unerringly through every step of the sales process to climb to your ultimate goal—a big sale.
