Team Exercise: Giving your best

Recently, at a Sales Team meeting, we were reviewing the metrics and performance, and addressing the inherent problems with “giving your best efforts.”

The team works hard, and subsequently believed that they were giving their best in one specific area of their performance. Despite their belief, they were stuck in familiar patterns and routines that needed to be reframed, or seen differently.

Following is a quick exercise that we did to break open their thinking to get different results. By the way, we have seen a 50% improvement for several weeks straight, due to new thinking, focused efforts and solid coaching from their sales leader.

Exercise: When giving your best is not your best

We began by framing our discussion around how giving our best feels like our best, but limits the options to truly give a breakthrough performance.

We then voted for a volunteer – the criteria this particular day was for the most athletic person – but you can choose any criteria for this exercise.

Brian was voted in. I gave Brian a colored piece of tape with very specific instructions. “I want you to give your very best effort, by jumping and sticking this piece of tape as high as you can on the wall in front of you.”

Brian truly is an athletic individual, and his result was remarkable. At approximately 10′ high on the wall stood a lone piece of tape. I asked how he felt with his effort. He said, “Good!” I then asked if he had truly given his best effort. He confirmed he had.

I then gave him a different colored piece of tape and simply said, “I would like you to beat your best.”

And he did…by nearly 3 inches. His comments afterward were, “Wow! When you asked me to do my best, I thought I had already done so, but apparently I was wrong.”

We debriefed the exercise together as a team, which led them to even better insights than what I had planned for them. I won’t pass those along so as not to predetermine how this exercise can and should be used with your teams. In short, what we saw was Brian adjust his whole approach to beating his best.

If you choose to do this exercise with your team, I would love to hear the results your team’s experience.

Jeff Michaels is a Sales & Marketing Executive that has worked with executives, leaders, & teams for 25 years to create repeatable success regardless of industry, economy or circumstance.

Challenger Sale: The Reframe Exercise

Practice reframes with ordinary objects

The Challenger Sale Choreography
If you are familiar with the Challenger Sale, you will quickly recognize the six components of the Challenger Choreography described as follows:

1. The Warmer
2. The Reframe
3. Rational Drowning
4. Emotional Impact
5. A New Way
6. Your Solution

A cursory review of what each stage of the choreography is intended to accomplish is largely unsurprising, and in five of the six stages, looks similar to many selling systems* out there.

There is more than meets the eye, especially as the real point of differentiation tends to hinge on the second stage with the Reframe. Being able to Reframe, or share an insight in a way that the prospect hasn’t thought of or considered before, is paramount to moving successfully through the rest of the choreography.

*Just a quick note to remind people that The Challenger Sale is not touted, nor intended as a ‘selling system.’ Brent Adamson shared the following on the topic in a blog post back in 2012…

“The Challenger Sale isn’t so much a “selling system,” as it is a way to think differently about how to approach customer interactions.”

— Brent Adamson

Cultivating Rep Proficiency with the Reframe
If you are looking to build proficiency in the way your sales and marketing staff successfully communicates reframes, perhaps the exercises we had done in weekly team meetings will be helpful to you in working with your teams.

Getting people to think differently about something in ways they have never done before is not an easy task, especially for those that had not been thinking that way. Therefore, we were looking to develop and cultivate competencies in this specific area so our team could recognize unique points of view and deliver them without the feeling of “starting from scratch,” as some had described the process.

The ‘Reframe’ Exercise

Following is an exercise I led the teams through to not just teach them what to say, but rather teach them how to think to create effective reframes.

Each Team Leader would bring a mystery grab bag of everyday items to the meeting. The team would pair up and grab an item from the bag. Representative items included things like scissors, a whiteboard eraser, aspirin, etc.

The pairs would take 5 minutes to come up with their Teaching Point, followed by a Warmer and a Reframe on their respective item. Next, they would present to the team for a team evaluation. We would then debrief with the whole team by asking a series of questions, such as, “Did they lead WITH the solution or lead TO the solution?” and “Did they share an insight in a way you hadn’t considered before?”

In one of the exercises, the teams were tasked with reframing the same item – a wire coat hanger. Some groups went down the path of calling out the many uses for a wire coat hanger (e.g., “perfect for unlocking car doors,” which is the stereotypical, product-centric, ‘lead WITH’ approach). We debriefed and they understood where they made their mistake.

However, following is what came from one group [in abbreviated form] as they had a better handle on the reframe process…

Teaching Point: Homeowners are often short on closet space and fail to realize the main culprits of closet space are plastic and wooden hangers which are 5-10 times the width of wire coat hangers.

Warmer: “We often hear from many of our customers that closet space at home is at a premium as they cite that they have too many clothes and their closets are too small. Is this something you experience as well? [They validate with the customer, so as not to assume a problem they don’t have]. The customer/prospect is invited to share the specific details of their problems.

Reframe: “We hear that a lot. In fact I hear solutions ranging from changing out their clothes for each season to complete remodels to build larger closets. What is interesting is that when you consider the #1 choice of hangers for most people, it is the plastic coat hanger. Have you ever considered the fact that a plastic hanger is 7x thicker than a wire coat hanger? Perhaps a different question is why your local dry cleaners don’t use plastic coat hangers? While many believe it is due to cost, their reason is that they would need to build a facility 1.3x larger to house the same number of articles of clothing that they currently house by using a wire coat hanger.

We call the process batting practice as it is a way of warming up before sales calls. This process has been fruitful with our teams as they have started to recognize and develop reframes on the fly to get people to see things differently all throughout the day.

In fact, for several, they have begun to pass along affirmations to their colleagues in the form of, “I never thought of it that way before,” when they have successfully reframed whatever the point was in which they were speaking. They are having fun with the process and the audience, be it customer, prospect, family member or friend, benefits as a result of the new insight.

Following is a resource you can use with your teams to practice Reframes of common everyday objects.

Share your insights on exercises you have used or are using with your teams.

Jeff Michaels is a Sales & Marketing Executive that has worked with executives, leaders, & teams for 25 years to create repeatable success regardless of industry, economy or circumstance.

The Sales Athlete: Do You Warm Up or Play Cold?

Have you ever considered how a professional athlete may perform in a game if they never practiced first? For the golfer, this may look like no time spent at the driving range before tournaments….or no batting practice between games for the baseball player…No free throws for the basketball player…No blocking and tackling for the Football player, etc.

Sure, their natural talent may certainly kick in and mask a bad performance during the game, but would a truly great performance be a realistic expectation of the professional athlete without first practicing?

We are all likely to agree that it is not realistic. More likely, the initial inning, quarter or period played is likely to produce mediocre results, with performance increasing as they get warmed up in real-time.

See where I am headed with this? Consider how often the sales professional jumps into the game with no warm ups. For many sales professionals, they may inaccurately chalk the first few losses on sales calls or appointments as the customer being a poor fit or uninterested. What if in truth, it had everything to do with the rep jumping in cold to a situation in which the customer would later respond better to a ‘warmed up’ competitor?

In doing analysis on contact rates some time ago on each of my outbound sales teams, I noticed that our best contact rates were generally in the morning, though the conversion rates were lower. In digging further, I saw that typically, these peak contact rates for our markets, were within 30-45 minutes of the rep’s shift beginning. The inference was that during peak opportunities with prospects, we were using the calls for what I call ‘game-time warm ups.’

Sales Warm-Up Exercises

As a result, we began incorporating warm up routines that we call ‘batting practice’ into weekly sales meetings and daily sales rep’s routines to improve our batting average. While we vary the activity to adjust to where we are needing the most practice, here are a couple quick and easy examples to follow to incorporate into your own batting practice.

Call yourself – Leave yourself a voice mail message with your most compelling point to provide value or a teaching point. Perhaps just a 30 second message that demonstrates credibility or adds value with reason to call back. See how you sound to yourself and determine if you would call yourself back. If not, refine and repeat.
Pair share – This is a quick exercise to do with a peer in which you practice a specific skill, question or comment in areas you are likely to find yourself dealing with. Over time, you will find that the paired reps begin to give more open and honest feedback on what statements ‘compelled’ and what ‘repelled.’ After all, they want the same type of feedback for themselves.
Spontaneous Reframes – At the leader level, we work on spontaneously coming up with a unique point of view and reframe on common, everyday objects or situations. The goal of these exercises is to quickly identify what we want to teach, then do a warmer statement to establish credibility in the topic and end with a reframed way of thinking about the object or situation. At the leader level, we call this ‘Iron sharpening iron.’

Those are a few ideas from what we are doing. How about you? Do you use unique exercises to warm up your sales leaders and reps?

Jeff Michaels is a Sales & Marketing Executive that has worked with executives, leaders, & teams for 25 years to create repeatable success regardless of industry, economy or circumstance.