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I was in Melbourne Thursday and Friday to conduct some on site training with a sales team and their two sales managers. One of the consultants was having trouble reproducing the results he had achieved in the last quarter.

He was certainly trying hard, he was always on the telephone or on the road. He was seeing as many people as he could, but nothing seemed to be going right for him. The prospects were interested, yes, “I’ll call you soon” etc. Nothing seemed to work.

I had a one on one interview with him and quietly asked him when the trouble started. He had great difficulty pinning it down. At first he said it was just bad luck and he was just having a bad run. He felt all he had to do was keep going and it would turn out okay in the end.

I said to him, “If you keep on doing what you are doing you will keep getting the result you are currently getting. We have to isolate what the outness is.”

In my experience, if a consultant has been sucessful and then goes into a trough (assuming others are still being successful) then, logically, the consultant has stopped doing something that was working.

We humans have a penchant for gaining a level of knowledge and understanding of a skill, knowledge or ability and automatically assume we know it all. We then, for some obscure reason (I actually know the reason, but that is for another discussion) alter our successful set of actions to “do it better.” On most occasions we crash.

It’s not that we necessarily do something wrong, we simply LEAVE SOMETHING OUT. WE OMIT A SUCCESSFUL ACTION.

I found out (eventually) that he had changed his way of sourcing sales leads. He shifted to a ‘more efficient’ method. He stopped cold calling and simply drove around his area and recorded company details so that he could telephone later for an appointment.

He stopped ‘presenting the body’ and so missed an opportunity to more exactly qualify the possible lead and develop rapport with the receptionist.

As soon as I identified what he had omitted his eyes widened and he said. “You know, it was two weeks after that that the slump started. He grinned and looked across at me. “I won’t have that problem again.”

We did many more things in the two days and, overall, much progress was made. We looked at the DVD on managing fear and applied it to the sales situation and, to my delight, a couple of the guys realised the application of managing fear in personal situations.

But it was the discovery of what the consultant discovered about what he was NOT doing that stuck in my mind.

He told me he had the best time.

Guess what, so did I.

Live well,

Ollie Lind