Better One-on-Ones Start Here
Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2025 4:13 am
The one-on-one is a moment filled with opportunity. By approaching it in a way that is sales-rep-centric and understanding which questions will boost your team morale and give your reps the training and support they need, you can make these regular reviews more efficient, productive, and actionable.We all need “a whack to the side of the head” to snap us out of daydreaming just like Edward de Bono advocated all those years ago. Yet most salespeople are glass-jawed fools because they plan to merely hit their number with spoon-fed leads from marketing, inside sales, or social media activity, sprinkled with a little of their own extra effort.
Wake up! Get off the canvas! Sniff the smelling salts of truth. You’re behind on points, so you’ve gotta find a way to win with a one-two-three knockout combo! Over and over and over again; stick and jab, stick and jab, absorb the knocks; grind it out . . . and then boom!
Professional selling is highly competitive, and there is constant chinese overseas america database pressure as you battle your inner demons, slugging it out against client apathy, barriers to engagement, and desperate competition. It goes 12 rounds, often 14, and it’s sometimes the technical knockout that wins when a razor-thin margin separates you from your competitor.
You don’t lose sales, competitors outsell you—and the biggest competitor you’ll ever face is doing nothing, aka the apathetic status quo. That’s Ali, that’s Frasier, that’s Tyson . . . for those who really know boxing, that’s Pacquiao or Roberto Duran. Everyone should watch Hands of Stone, about the versatile Panamanian brawler Duran, arguably one of the greatest of all time, who beat Sugar Ray Leonard with strategic combos.
Boxing has so many parallels to sales, so any great boxing movie, including Raging Bull, can teach the modern seller much. The biggest battles you’ll face are from within. The discipline is not to expend too much energy in the first round, to be strategic rather than use brute force, to truly know your competition, and to leverage weaknesses. And these are just some examples.
You’re only as good as your last win. Many fail and live lives of quiet desperation behind a professionally smiling facade. A sales career can be brutal. Delivering revenue is the only thing that protects you, but revenue is an outcome, not an activity.
A properly qualified pipeline is required to generate revenue, and a high level of intelligent activity is what’s needed to create a pipeline. As a salesperson, the cure of all ills is profitable revenue; lots of revenue is fueled by a big sales pipeline, which also removes the pressure from selling.
Wake up! Get off the canvas! Sniff the smelling salts of truth. You’re behind on points, so you’ve gotta find a way to win with a one-two-three knockout combo! Over and over and over again; stick and jab, stick and jab, absorb the knocks; grind it out . . . and then boom!
Professional selling is highly competitive, and there is constant chinese overseas america database pressure as you battle your inner demons, slugging it out against client apathy, barriers to engagement, and desperate competition. It goes 12 rounds, often 14, and it’s sometimes the technical knockout that wins when a razor-thin margin separates you from your competitor.
You don’t lose sales, competitors outsell you—and the biggest competitor you’ll ever face is doing nothing, aka the apathetic status quo. That’s Ali, that’s Frasier, that’s Tyson . . . for those who really know boxing, that’s Pacquiao or Roberto Duran. Everyone should watch Hands of Stone, about the versatile Panamanian brawler Duran, arguably one of the greatest of all time, who beat Sugar Ray Leonard with strategic combos.
Boxing has so many parallels to sales, so any great boxing movie, including Raging Bull, can teach the modern seller much. The biggest battles you’ll face are from within. The discipline is not to expend too much energy in the first round, to be strategic rather than use brute force, to truly know your competition, and to leverage weaknesses. And these are just some examples.
You’re only as good as your last win. Many fail and live lives of quiet desperation behind a professionally smiling facade. A sales career can be brutal. Delivering revenue is the only thing that protects you, but revenue is an outcome, not an activity.
A properly qualified pipeline is required to generate revenue, and a high level of intelligent activity is what’s needed to create a pipeline. As a salesperson, the cure of all ills is profitable revenue; lots of revenue is fueled by a big sales pipeline, which also removes the pressure from selling.