Win More Sales by Returning to These 5 Basics With Flawless Execution

As a sales professional, would you like to win more sales? Have you attended seminars, read tons of sales books and yet your goal to increase sales is still not realized or where you believe it should be given all of your efforts? Maybe it is time to return to the basics with flawless execution.

Recently, I came across a story about legendary Coach Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers. This story shared how Coach Lombardi began each football training camp. He opened up the first day's practice sessions with this statement while holding a football in one hand: "Gentlemen, this is a football."

In further reading, the story explained how the Green Bay Packers under Lombardi's tutelage had only 5 offensive running plays. All the other teams knew these 5 plays. Yet, the Packers continued to win in spite of this perceived handicap because they executed these plays flawlessly. Through rigorous practice, each team member knew what to do almost instinctively because a strong habit had been developed.

Now think about this respective to your sales behaviors. If you executed the basics of sales with similar flawless execution, how many more sales could you win?

This leads to the question of what are those basics? And that is a great question.

Basic Sales Behavior #1

What would happen in you had no more than 5 basic plans or offensive plays? Each play would be dependent upon your target market and where the play was taking place? Within each plan, you would have the specific actions necessary to get the ball that being a sale closer to the goalpost.

Basic Sales Behavior #2

Another basic behavior would include effective communication. You need to be able to read the non-verbal communication coming from your potential customer or qualified potential customer. Failure to take the proper action may result in a fumble and a lost sale.

Basic Sales Behavior #3

Research of your target market, current market conditions, trends within the marketplace and general business acumen are just as necessary basics as they were 100 years ago. Lack of important facts can doom a sale even before the first contact is made.

Basic Sales Behavior #4

Having an open ended questions based upon your research and overall plays is another basic sales skill behavior. When you execute the questioning process flawlessly, you are building the relationship while discovering those issues that are important to your potential customer.

Basic Sales Behavior #5

This last behavior or sales skill is demonstrated at all times through the other behaviors and that is your authenticity specific to your values and ethics. Are you believable? Do you do what you say you will do? Without a clearly articulate values statement that is put into practice at all times, will leave you in the sea of sameness with all those other gray suits.

TAKE ACTION SALES COACHING TIP: You can win more sales through practice that leads to flawless execution. The only remaining question is: Are you willing to invest the time to realize your goal to increase sales? And only you can answer that question.

Take this free sales skills assessment to help you increase sales.

You probably do not want to be uncomfortable. Who does? Yet, you want to increase sales and to stop all those sleepless nights right before sales figures are due. Now is the time to give Leanne a call at 219.759.5601 to schedule a free business coaching training or sales coaching strategy session. Experience how being uncomfortable can actually help you increase sales.

P.S. Want to win more sales? Then how well do you flawlessly execute this first basic play or sales behavior of a sales plan?

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At Tomorrow's AOL Investor Day, Will "Execution" Focus Mean Cylinders Firing or Heads Rolling?

Talking to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong earlier this week about its investors day tomorrow, he used the word “execution” a lot.

No, not the kind evoking a firing squad if he did not succeed at turning around the New York-based Internet giant soon as he has long promised.

Instead, Armstrong was referring to reassuring big shareholders and Wall Street analysts that AOL was now in a mode of making sure all its many moves to turn around the company will finally begin to pay off.

“Basically, our point is going to be about fully operating around the strategy we’ve built,” said Armstrong in a wide-ranging interview. “It seems right for investors to ask about executing on what we have been doing for the last year and a half.”

It’s certainly the right message for the charismatic executive to be delivering, as he and other top AOL execs present their plans moving forward, especially after what has turned out to be a very hyperactive year.

After deep layoffs, a massive rejiggering of its management ranks and a number of shifts of its business focus, without much advertising increase to show for it yet, Armstrong has also pushed through a series of acquisitions.

It culminated in the high-profile and decidedly dramatic purchase of the Huffington Post in January for $350 million in cash.

Now, said Armstrong, deals will be taking a back seat to products.

“We are diligently staying on strategy and really focusing on products and services,” said Armstrong. “We have laid out the path we are on and now investors want proof of the concept.”

To Armstrong, that means the push of “branded content” and a continued focus on significant properties in key topic areas.

Tomorrow, in news that could worry investors, AOL will be noting that traffic is flat year over year, but explaining that it is due to the outsourcing of its sports and health sites.

“If you added that back in, we would have had a phenomenal year of growth,” said Armstrong. “Our main point will be that this is the right path for AOL.”

In fact, in an unusual wording, he said AOL was betting on the “urbanization” of the Web around big branded sites, which is, in many ways, exactly where the Web was a decade ago with Yahoo, Excite and others.

But Armstrong will be making the point that this retro idea is perfect for today, as marketers look for quality content that attracts big audiences, which has seen its most energetic application in the Huffington Post.

Thus, his linchpin remains the flashy news site’s even flashier co-founder Arianna Huffington, who has cut a very wide swath through AOL’s content efforts since Amstrong made her media czar of the company.

As Armstrong did, she also stressed the focus on unique visitors and ad growth, more video and a laser focus on local.

This includes shoving editorial into every AOL property, including unlikely ones such as Moviefone and MapQuest, and integrating it all to point back to the Huffington Post mothership.

“Much better editorial integration is a centerpiece of what we are doing, surfacing content in new places it was not before,” said Huffington, who used examples of local stories via its Patch unit that have gone global with a special push.

And by global, that also means the creation of new content sites in Europe and elsewhere, in order to build this unusual dream of a fully aggregating world.

“It is a big test of the HuffPo platform aggregation to do this,” said Huffington, who has clearly longed for the kind of money and staff to do this for a very long time. “It has moved a lot faster than I thought it would … but it feels good to be moving on so many fronts at once.”

Many fronts indeed, which might make investors pause. So far, those shareholders have had a continued wait-and-see attitude toward AOL, which has seen its stock decline almost 13 percent from its late 2009 IPO debut.

That’s mostly due to worries about whether the continued and expected fall-off of its lucrative access business can be met by similar increases in its ad business.

That share drop has been especially steep since the beginning of the year, but it has also not been drastic, indicating an interest in continuing to believe Armstrong’s confident — well, confidently delivered, at least — narrative.

As Citi’s Mark Mahaney wrote in a one-hand-other-hand note yesterday about the investor day:

Positives: 1) AOL still remains a top 5 U.S. Internet property; 2) In the latest quarter, AOL’s Display segment grew Y/Y for the first time in ~3 years, and this improvement seems sustainable; 3) At 4x ’11 EV/EBITDA, AOL’s valuation is among the lowest of any ’Net Stock. Negatives: 1) Deteriorating fundamentals; 2) Significant market share losses — ’Net usage, Display Advertising revenue & Search queries; 3) A significant profit hole from the structural decline of its Subs biz; 4) Substantial competitive risk; and 5) An unproven (@ AOL) management team.

“We all like Tim and what he says makes a lot of sense,” added one big investor, who is also attending and has many questions about the efficacy of what AOL is doing, in a common sentiment among its large shareholders. “But we also need to see real results soon.”

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