The Performance Improvement Plan - Five Things You Need to Work on Today

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Today's principle is that average action will always get you average results.

Most salespeople barely hit their quota and that used to be me as well. It wasn't until I started becoming more unreasonable with my expectations that my income started to explode.

The cold hard truth is that what you did to have success during the good times is not going to be enough to make it through a recession.

Therefore, you need to become unreasonable. Unreasonable with your levels of action. Unreasonable with your assertiveness. Unreasonable in taking new approaches that you hadn't considered previously to find and close new business.

Practically this means 5 things –

1– Longer hours

You may have to work longer hours at least at first to start testing what works and what doesn't in this new selling environment.

How you generated leads during easy times is unlikely to be effective when you try implementing it during a recession. You’re going to find that prospects want to speak to salespeople even less than before.

I'm not saying that you should reduce the amount of sleep that you get each night so that you can squeeze a few more hours of prospecting each day. What I am saying is, that you will need to uncover new ways of achieving your previous level of results.

2– Then become lazy

Counter the first point, as soon as you uncover a better way of finding and closing new business you need to become lazy. Uncover the 20% of efforts that is getting you 80% of your results and focus in on that. Ditch the crap that isn’t crushing it.

Then a few weeks later, find the 20% of effort that is getting you 80% of the results within your new process. And continue this until every moment that you are working in the new selling environment, you're generating meetings and progressing sales to a close.

The recession that we’re in is not like COVID. During COVID the advice from sales experts was to stay in touch with prospects, even if they weren't buying from you in that moment and to start to build stronger relationships with them so that when the money starts following, your deals will come back to life.

COVID however was a completely different environment to a real recession because it was artificial. Governments were stopping people going to the office, the public could not spend their cash the ways that they would usually do so. So the market was artificially held back for 12 months.

This time around we have an organic and completely natural downturn in the economy. Companies still have cash; you must work out the most efficient way to get in between the problem they have and the solution they need so that you can accept payment for solving their pain point.

3– Lose the losers

This next point can be a tough to implement but has a dramatic effect during a reccession.

We've all heard the saying that you are “the average of the five people that you spend the most time with”. There is also science to back this up. Most people earn between plus or minus 20% of what their parents earn for example.

What does this tell us?

This tells us that we need to stop spending time around people, influencers, and media that are not helping us progress towards our sales goals.

That includes any colleagues who are panicking about their performance right now. It's very unlikely that spending time with individuals who are panicking is going to improve your chances of smashing quota. So don't do it. The same goes with cutting out the news and social media. Ignore all of it, get your head down, complete the sales activities that lead to success in this new economy, and you'll be just fine.

4– Minimalism

Step four follows a similar pathway to step three. We need to become minimalists.

I'm not saying that you should sell your house and move into a small white room with a mattress on the floor with no cutlery. Instead think about this definition of minimalism – “remove anything that doesn't help you become the person that you want to be”.

Tying this directly into your sales role, you should remove any activity or interaction that doesn't progress you towards becoming a person who smashes their sales quota regardless of the economic climate.

Does that expensive watch move you towards becoming the person you need to become to hit quota? Or would you be better off spending that cash getting training and unlimited coaching from a organisation like us over salesman.com?

5– Become assertive

The final step is to become more assertive. You going to have to ask for the business more often to close it during a recession. You going to have to implement longer and more assertive sales cadences to book the same number of meetings during a recession. You must be clearer with your outreach in general if anyone's ever going to listen to you during a recession.

So that is it, 5 steps to breaking the idea the average gets average results.

1. Longer hours
2. Then become lazy
3. Lose the losers
4. Minimalism
5. Become assertive

If you do an extraordinary amount of work, which doesn't just mean more hours comment it means working smarter, you will get extraordinary results. Recession or not, this is what leads salespeople to truly become wealthy in this industry.