I am finally reading Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I've only been carrying it around for 2 years and, yesterday, on a flight read the first half. The concept of 10,000 hours is one of the many pages I've dog eared. This is the concept with supporting examples that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert and a stand-out. I've always been a believer that experience counts in sales. Think about how much time you actually spend in front of a customer practicing your trade - 10 hours/week if you're lucky? How long would it take to gain 10,000 hours of practice? 19 years? 25 years?
YIKES!
So, if you want to be an expert, you have to find more practice time. Here are some ideas:
- First of all, use your weekly sales meeting as a one-hour practice session. - 1 hour/week (Who saw that coming?)
- Role play your upcoming customer encounters with a team member or manager before the customer encounter. - 2 hours per week
- Spend time pre-call planning - opening statements, questions, objection responses, etc - 2 hours per week
- Take one sales training class per year. - 16 hours per year
- Spend 2 more hours per week with customers than you do now. - 2 hours per week
- Regularly attend a customer meeting with a peer to observe them. - 2 hours per month
So, adding all of this to your current 10 customer hours per week, you'll be at 18 hours per week which would put you at expert status in half the time as your peers. My math shows 10 years (which is how long it seems to take in any field - music, technology, sports).
I love this concept because it means you have control over how you stack up against your peers in the marketplace. Invest time in your trade and it pays off.
Sales Team Meeting Idea:
- As a team, ask each person to calculate their own individual sales practice hours. Just use number of years of experience, add in training hours and ask each team member to come up with their number.
- Now, as a team, figure out how to get an additional 5-10 hours per week of sales practice.
- Commit to getting more practice and then track your performance against other sales teams in your own company. What results do you expect?
Enjoy working on your 10,000 hours.