#048: Olympics and sales

Read time: 2 minutes

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Nick ran a great session on using AI to do research on your accounts and turn that research into highly personalized, relevant messaging that can be used for prospecting or discovery calls.

We run these SkillUp sessions once a week on different topics to give you actionable tips and techniques you can use right away in your day to day job.

This Wednesday we’re focusing on prospecting.

So if you’re looking to get in front of more potential customers, come join us!

With the Olympics going on this week, it got me thinking.

The best athletes in the world spend years practicing and training for one moment that in some cases is over in less than a minute.

But in sales, we’re expected to attend a full-day training event and implement everything we learned immediately.

We don’t put aside time for our own practice and training. Or if we do it’s a cringy role-play scenario that would never actually happen in real life.

This is why so much training doesn’t stick and sales training has a negative stigma.

In this newsletter, I’ll give you 5 different ways you can practice and train your sales skills in a non-cringy way.

“The best practice on purpose. The rest practice on prospects” - Kevin Dorsey

1: Coach during the prep work

It’s great to review a call or meeting and provide feedback, there is nothing that can be done to fix the call. Instead, do your coaching to prepare for the call. What are all the things you will cover? How will you handle certain objections? What do you want the next steps to be? Who are you trying to get access to? How will you start the call?

Go through everything ahead of time and get feedback and coaching. Then you’ll be more prepared going into the call and your debrief after can look back on how you prepared and if you executed how you thought you would.

2: Reinforce what you already know

Just because you “know” something, doesn’t mean you implement it on every call or that you execute it to the highest level possible. It’s important to go back and review training materials over and over and over. Pick out something you want to get better at and continuously go back to that material to make sure you’re implementing it effectively on every call.

3: Pick one skill

Most reps try and do everything all at once which can be overwhelming. You can’t remember all the things you want to try and then get frustrated when you forget about them. Instead, take the one skill you want to improve and only focus on doing that one thing. If that’s always getting next steps, always asking for a referral, always quantifying the business impact of the problem, etc.

Whatever it is, pick only one thing and focus on it until it becomes second nature. Then pick the next skill and do the same.

4: Roleplay one part of a call

Most reps hate roleplays because they’re not real and you end up trying to do an entire call in one role play. Instead, roleplay one part of a call over and over. Roleplay your introduction for the call 2-3x before you jump on that important call. Roleplay asking for next steps and dealing with different objections. Roleplay how you would deliver pricing with confidence and handle their responses.

Focus on micro-moments and practice those. It will make them infinitely easier when they come up live on the call.

5: Objection handling

“In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and sales objections.” - Benjamin Franklin

If the first time you’re handling an objection is live on a call with a prospect then you haven’t prepared well enough. There are at most 10 different types of objections you will come across. They can all be generally bucketed together. Write all of them down, write out your response, and then practice saying it.

Inside Succession, you’ll find our course on objection handling with a template you can use for the exercise: https://community.succession.bio/c/resource-library/objection-handling-response-worksheet

Conclusion

These are a few ways that you can practice and improve your sales skills without being cringe or taking up a lot of your time.

The best athletes in the world spend 99% of their time training and practicing.

While that’s not realistic for sales, even if you increase your training by a small amount, it can make all the difference.

Take an hour a week or 15 min a day and dedicate it to practice and training.

What skill are you going to focus on first?

1. Succession for Reps: A skill development platform for life science sales reps who want to improve their sales skills, exceed their quota, and take the next step in their career.

2. Succession for Teams: If you’re a sales leader who’s frustrated with reps living in reactive mode and either not proactively generating new opportunities or letting prospects go dark, reach out to learn more about our team plans.

3. AI-Powered Prospecting: We’ll build you an AI-powered prospecting machine to book qualified sales meetings with biotech and pharma companies.

4. Strategy Call: Need more than training? Want help implementing and executing your sales strategy? In a 30-minute call, we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.

Special Offer: If you’ve made it this far, you can use the coupon code NEWSLETTER to get 20% off an individual Succession membership.

Recommended Products & Tools: We’ve used every one of these products and can highly recommend them to you. Everything from CRMs to AI tools.

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