It Takes Process to Make a Good Salesperson GREAT.

Happy Holidays - Get HyperFly and InMail2Gmail -FREE

These are two sales productivity apps I built to serve my own sales efficiency requirements. They are free. Please use them and share them with your sales brothers and sisters.

Happy Holidays and happy selling in 2017.

Hyperfly InMail2Gmail

Ever since I started in sales in 1987 I've been obsessed with achieving sales greatness through process and efficiency.

My first CRM was a metal box with cardboard date and alphabetic dividers. I know, I say that all the time. It puts things in perspective. I had a system with the crude tools I had and it worked. I used 5x7 index cards and stapled blue and white D&B's (business owners with +1mm in revenue which was our target market) to them. The contact details and follow up appointments were also memorialized in my notebook calendar. Backup. I stuck to a strict format for where on the card and how I took my detailed notes about our prospects' requirements and used both numbers and highlighter colors to indicate which content I had mailed to them and what products they were interested in.

Even then I lived by my calendar. After my morning ritual of fetching coffee and cigarettes for my boss Marty, I called those leads in the precise order I had placed them to be called before starting on the day's 100 cold call requirement. Dialer? What's that? It was 1987. We dialed and dialed from those blue and white index cards.

No one showed me what to do. I was issued the raw materials, a script, the metal box, the cards, some highlighters and sat down in front of a phone. My desk was the end of someone else's desk, between the desk and the wall.

My process was birthed by my desire to avoid Marty's wrath. Marty was a bear of a man. He was a former Maccabi Games champion wrestler, ten years after his glory days, and with quite a bit of padding that had arrived hand in hand with his sales success. Marty had twinkling blue eyes. He wore pink shirts, blue shirts, green shirts, shirts every color of the rainbow, mostly with contrasting white cuffs and collars. Marty wore a diamond pinky ring on both hands. It was the 80's, that's what made too much money too fast guys like Marty wore. Diamonds on their pinkies. He was mercurial. Jolly as Santa one moment, as focused on closing deals as Patton was on beating Montgomery to Sicily the next. And just as forgiving as Patton. I was 20 years old, two months out of the University of Michigan and he scared the shit out of me.

I began my focus on sales efficiency motivated by fear. Fear of Marty. Fear is a powerful motivator. I was terrified. Marty was fond of informing us, his minions that "...there is always another ass for every seat, boys, get on the phones."

Marty liked me though. In my interview, he told me he was giving me a shot because I sounded clairvoyant. He was puzzled when I asked him in response to his gracious compliment and my apparent good fortune if he wanted me to read his palm. He looked at me blankly, ignored my question and told me to show up that next Monday at 7:30 am. He meant eloquent of course, not clairvoyant. That was Marty. He was the Norm Crosby of sales superstars. He was very engaging. When he spoke to you in person, and he also managed to magically convey this over the phone, it was as if you and he were the only person in the universe. You had Marty's attention completely, no doubt about it, when he was talking to you. If you can make people feel like that you are certain to get their undivided attention in return. Marty was like that.

The first four months I worked for Marty, he never looked in my metal box at the leads I had gotten him. Not once. He never asked me what I was doing, but he could see me, all day long. Often enough I looked up and saw him alternately glaring or grinning at me. It was unnerving, I had no idea what he was thinking. I was 15 feet from him and got to listen to every word he said. I didn't know much, just a few months out of school, but I knew enough that that alone made the drudgery worthwhile. When his lighter bounced off the wall and hit me in the chest, that meant I should go get him more cigarettes. Marty smoked a lot. I toiled on. Then one day, the bottom fell out of the market for what we sold. Marty's customers fled in droves. His book of business was worse than decimated. Marty, our company's anchor, the big dog top producer was laid low. Like everyone else, he was back to zero. Sales. That was the life he chose.

In the next 120 days Marty tore into my leads, calling them frantically to rebuild his business.

The outcome?

Four months after the market for our product fell out of bed, Marty had the biggest commission month in our company's history. The first $100,000 commission month. Marty said that my leads were the best leads he had ever seen in his ten years in the business. All I had done was ask the simple questions I had been told to ask, the same way, in the same order, every time. I wrote the answers to those questions in the same place in the same order on those index cards. I always asked a silly question at the end. "If a movie was to be made about your life, who would play you?, "If you were a food, what food would you be?", "Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry which is your favorite?". Marty loved that, it helped people remember that we had actually called them before. Back then in the Stone Ages, that's all we did, we called people. And we sold them things. And we did it day in day out. From dusk to dawn.

In front of the entire company, at the meeting that had been organized to present Marty's commision check to him. Marty graciously acknowledged the entire team for our contribution to his success. Mary Jane, his sales assistant. Wolfgang, Pete and Bill, the junior salespeople who made up his pod, and me, his tireless, efficient, process oriented cold caller who had stuffed a metal box with leads. I was only able to do that because of my anxiety-avoidance driven process. My process drove my persistent follow up. Nothing in the world in sales takes the place of persistence. Everyone worked hard and dialed and dialed and dialed. I did that, too, but I was more organized. My fear of Marty and my fear of failure forced me into a process. That process ensured my success. It wasn't rocket science then and it isn't today.

My immediate reward?

A diamond pinky ring of my own. Just what I always wanted. Not. Six .125 carat diamonds set in gold and platinum. Mary Jane was spitting mad. She'd been with Marty for two years and got a $1,000 bonus. I'd been there eight months and got a diamond ring. And, I had to wear that diamond ring proudly, every day. Good grief. Thankfully, those diamonds adorn my wife's neck this very day and not my pinky.

My long term reward?

I learned that it doesn't matter how talented or hardworking a salesperson is, without a determined ongoing focus on process they can only ever be good.

It takes process to make a good salesperson great.

That was 30 years ago. That lesson has served me well in my career. The concept of continuous improvement does not just apply to the software I sell. Continuous improvement is a state of mind to be applied to any process. Apply it to your sales process. That state of mind drove me to build HyperFly and Inmail2Gmail. It drives me to be the very best at what I do. To continuously look to get better. If you want extreme results you have to put in an extreme effort. Just working hard without process can not produce an extreme enough effort to have extreme results.

I heard recently that Marty passed, tragically, a few months ago. Rest in peace, my friend. I learned a lot from you.

Please enjoy and share these apps with your sales colleagues. It would honor me, and honor Marty's memory.

To this day I can recite my cold call pitch from my job with Marty on demand as if the last time I did it 100 times in one day was last Friday. For any new sales people reading this, that's how well you should learn what you are going to say when your life, your job at least, depends on your unconscious competence at saying it.

For all you 40+ year old salespeople who might read this: Don't be a dodo bird.

Happy Holidays.

Gregg