Is Working In Sales A Sprint Or A Marathon?
You have heard the phrase before “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.” Surely someone has tried to relate this phrasing to your sales career as well. Recently Aberdeen Research’s Peter Ostrow published a very interesting report titled It’s A Marathon, Not A Sprint: Best-In-Class B2B Sales Training For An Ever-Changing Market and it made me think about the whole marathon vs sprint metaphor.
Well guess what? While agreeing with a lot of what is in the report, I think the metaphor isn’t right. Sales is a sprint AND a marathon. After all, even the fastest marathon runners can still sprint a mile at a four minute pace.
As a salesperson, you need to be training for both the sprint of sales and the marathon. You need to be closing deals, building long-term relationships, nurturing potential prospects, and writing proposals all at the same time. Oh yeah, and do not forget the corporate bullshit like expense reports, management meetings and CRM data entry that comes along the way.
How Do You Manage Your Sales Meetings, Opportunities And Everything Else?
If you aren’t using Spiro’s sales automation CRM, it is not easy balancing it all, but that is the life of a salesperson.
My personal approach as a sales manager was to always have a quarterly plan. I would set goals for how many prospects we could uncover and how many deals we would close to make our number.
Then each week, I would figure out what I needed to do to make sure that we hit those goals. I would build a plan of action that would move us toward the goals, but I would remain flexible as obstacles and opportunities arose.
Some weeks, we would enter sprint mode trying to close the next deal. Other weeks, we would be in marathon mode focusing on cultivating those long term relationships.
The key was to find a balance in both. It is easy to get lazy on slower weeks when sales are not closing, but that is your prime time to focus on the marathon aspects of the race. Those are the key times to focus on nurturing those prospects and building long-term relationships.
Strategic Sales Thinking in Action
I was a keynote speaker at a sales kickoff meeting last week in Philadelphia. Before I gave my engaging talk How To Sell Big Fucking Deals I asked some of the reps a few questions:
- What is your average sale?
- What is your target?
It turned out that $30K was around the average sale for these reps, yet they had on average a $1.5M quota. Math isn’t my strong point, but quickly I figured out that these sales guys would have to do 50 deals in the year just to hit their number.
If they are like most sales guys, their average close rate is somewhere between 30-50%. Let’s go with 40%, which means they need to put out 125 proposals in the year.
That is more than two proposals a week including Thanksgiving and Christmas.
It also means they probably need to somehow generate around 300 prospect meetings to get out those 125 proposals.
These guys were running their marathon as a sprint. Without being focused on how to manage their time and plan their week, they’re fighting with one hand behind their back.
They need to start thinking big picture and plan for the marathon.
Best Sales Results Come From Having The Right Sales Strategy
Success in sales is more than just your sales ability. Your sales ability will help you during those sprints of closing the next deal, but without the marathon training the sprints will never happen. As Peter Ostrow’s research shows, the right approach to sales can have a material impact on your result.
Are you running your marathon as a sprint? Maybe it’s time for a change of strategy.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user William Murphy.
