Good morning, everyone. This is Don Buttry with sales professional training. We'll begin the webinar after a few minor technical difficulties. This particular webinar is called six regimens that are vital for construction equipment sales professionals. And again, I'm Don Buttry with sales professional training. The economy is seeing modest growth. Many of you as dealers have seen market improvements over the last few years. Whenever we enjoy good levels of business for a period, and that period may end, there is a risk that salespeople will be distracted from proactive activities. We can get caught up in the urgent with quote requests, keeping customers happy, and putting out fires. Right now is the time to proactively sell and be order makers, not order takers. This requires establishing some regimens, which we're going to talk about, to make sure that we are consistent in the planning disciplines that are essential for sales professionals. Planning disciplines like territory planning, account strategic planning, pre-call tactical planning. This powerful webinar will equip frontline sales professionals and sales managers with the direction and proven tools that are essential for getting these vital planning disciplines accomplished. These activities are time management investments that assure short and long term sales success. The tools and disciplines that we introduce today are part of a comprehensive curriculum for sales professionals titled The Four Pillars of the Sales Profession. The Four Pillars of the Sales Profession is an intensive three-day curriculum that directs and equips salespeople to become true sales professionals. At Sales Professional Training, we believe in building structure, tools, and disciplines into this sales profession. The Four Pillars will establish a solid foundation to really help you build your team and begin to build some notable improvements in your sales team structure. Not just a bunch of hype, but some solid foundational structure. The Four Pillars are personal disciplines, relationship skills, strategic selling, and tactical selling. This webinar introduces some of the vital components that are covered in this comprehensive course. Within the Four Pillars, we've identified, and these are things that we cover when we cover everything in the course, we've identified 24 personal disciplines that are essential for salespeople. Positive attitude, technical knowledge, time management, territory management, and the list goes on, listening, prospecting, protecting accounts, formal accounts, strategic planning, etc. Actually, this is the first tool that we're offering as part of this webinar. There's going to be numerous tools that we talk about, and we'll talk about how you can receive those and get those after this session. Notice that these are called personal disciplines because, really, the first pillar, personal disciplines, really indicates how important personal ownership is. You can't just have management saying, do this, do this, do that, because salespeople have to own it. It has to be a part of them. That's why I love this slide. You know, the sales manager says, why aren't you working? And the salesperson says, well, I didn't see you coming. It's about the salesperson knowing what it looks like to be a professional salesperson and then doing that. And there's a big difference between adopting something or just complying with what management wants, or transforming instead of just conforming, or having passion instead of just reluctance, to really own something versus obeying it. So that's a foundational part of what we're going to look at in this webinar is that the frontline salesperson has to know what those disciplines are, has to own those, and really work on those. To really help salespeople get started on executing all of these disciplines, in this webinar we're going to zero in on six of these that are vital, and we'll help them establish a regimen prescription for those six vital regimens. And that's what we're going to unfold in this webinar today. Before we look at those six regimens that'll really help salespeople take ownership, let me first of all look at the definition of a regimen. A regimen, by definition, is a prescribed course of medical treatment, diet, or disciplines. It's a way of life, and that's a very important part of that definition. A way of life for the promotion or restoration of health. I like the original Middle English from the Latin actually means to rule. The word regere means to rule. I really like that because we've got to rule our territories, we've got to run our territories instead of our territories running us. Let me give you just a really quick personal application of this, a personal story. Because a regimen is a prescribed course of medical treatment or a diet. About four years ago I lost 40 pounds. Now I didn't do that at my age by doing P90X or by punishing myself or never eating a piece of bread or fasting. What I did is I established some regimens. I started walking every morning, I started walking every night, very religiously, as a regimen, as a discipline, ongoing. Not a short-term thing where I was trying to lose 40 pounds or I was looking at the numbers or the scale or the quotas or whatever, but what I was doing was saying I'm going to make some changes that I know will bring health, a new way of life that I'm not going to do just for a while, but it's going to be a part of my lifestyle from now on that will promote health and restoration. So I did that and I started eating a big breakfast, a small lunch, and very little for dinner. I was actually on Prilosec, an acid reducer, I had been on that for 10 years. Well with my doctor's help and working through this I changed some things. I established the walking regimen, I changed the way I eat, I quit eating processed foods, and what happened is, pound by pound, it started ticking off until I got down to my appropriate weight, 40 pounds less. And I've kept that off for four and a half years. Because it wasn't just losing weight, what it was was a way of life. And I established some regimens that I'm doing to this day, every morning I walk, every evening I walk, and I actually look forward to that, it's a prescribed course of treatment. Can you see how this can apply to sales? So many sales people are struggling, they've got time management issues, they're a day late and a dollar short, they're just responding to incoming opportunities, putting out fires, and they're not really healthy. And it's distracting them from taking control and doing the right things. If we can help them establish those sales regimens, and build them into their, and these have to be doable, realistic, like I said, I didn't do P90X, I didn't fast, what I did is I just established some doable regimens. And if we can help sales people to establish some doable regimens, then what's going to happen is they're going to start seeing, slowly but surely, seeing their territory, their sales numbers, their margins, their market share performance improve. And I'm convinced that these regimens will help them. You know, I've been teaching sales people for nearly 20 years, and I love the quote from the great Bear Bryant, Coach Bear Bryant was the winningest coach in college football, and he said, I know what it takes to win. And if I can sell them on what it takes to win, we're not going to lose too many football games. And I like that, and it's the same thing, if you're a sales manager, if you can sell your people on these vital regimens, and say, you know, figure out what this looks like for you, and that's why I'm going to walk you through this today, if they can figure out what that looks like, and actually establish doable regimens, because it's going to be different for everybody, depending on their territory, their situation, their personality, their customer base, that's why they have to own it. They have to establish those regimens. Before we get into these six vital regimens, let me share a couple quotes by the great Vince Lombardi. Vince said, unless a man believes in himself, and makes a total commitment to his career, and puts everything he has into it, his mind, his body, and his heart, then what is life worth to him? And then Lombardi said this, if I were a salesperson, I would make this commitment to my company, to the product, and most of all, to myself. And then he said, once a man has made a commitment to a way of life, he puts the greatest strength, in the world behind him. It's something we call heart power. Heart power. And once a man has made this commitment, nothing will stop him, short of success. And then he said one more thing, that I'd like to just ring in your ears, as we move into these regimens. He said, winning is not a sometime thing, it's an all the time thing. You don't do the right things once in a while, you don't win once in a while, you do the right things all the time. Because winning is a habit. If we can establish those winning habits, those vital regimens for salespeople, man, can you imagine what can happen with your team, and with your performance? See, I'm not giving you a bunch of slick, cute ideas and tips about sales, I'm talking about the fundamentals, the disciplines. Now this particular handout is also available on the links, and you'll probably see that on your screen, and we'll talk more about this, but all the handouts that I show you are available for you to download personally, or for you to use for your team. Now let's look at the top part of this particular tool, this vital regimens tool. Up at the top, it's got a space for them to put their name and their sales manager, because I want their sales manager to be involved in this. It says, utilize this tool immediately following sales training, or camp, or in this case, the webinar, and commit to your realistic prescription for six vital regimens. These regimens support tangible improvement for the vital items included in the personal disciplines checklist from the four pillars that we talked about. As a sales professional, individually defining, owning, and executing these regimens will perpetuate, and see this is the key here, long-term success and results. And documenting these now, and I'm going to ask you after this webinar to start working on this immediately as individuals. That will make sure that it sustains, that you implement it, and that it really works, and make sure they're doable regimens. This is why this is a very personal thing. This is your personal prescription. Complete this. Make sure it fits in with your responsibilities, your goals, corporate expectations, et cetera, and then meet with your manager, and let them be a part of this, and to really help you coach through this. Let's look at regimen one. We're going to work through all six of these. Some we'll spend a little more time on than others, because they're so essential and vital, and just for this quick hour, I want to hit on a few of the key ones. Let's just work through the first few. Regimen one, reporting actions. Now you know I'm not afraid to pull any punches, because this is something that is always a can of worms. Salespeople don't necessarily always want to report their actions. They struggle with CRM and entering in call reports, but there's two things that I really believe are vital for salespeople, and that is, first of all, week and month ahead planning. Week and month ahead planning includes personal management of their calendar, scheduling of travel, setting proactive and follow-up appointments. This is not a reactive thing, where just after they make a call, they're saying, hey, I called on so-and-so, and we talked about this. Even though that's part of the importance of call reporting, so that the whole team knows what they're doing, so that they can really monitor their progress and be aware of what happened in the previous call, which is going to affect their tactical plan in the next call, call reporting is essential, as long as it's realistic, balanced, and there's not just a bunch of Mickey Mouse paperwork, but it's important, and salespeople need to own it. It's not just Big Brother watching you. It's managing your territory. Call reporting is important, but I always take it a step further and say even more important in reporting actions is that week and month ahead planning, where you're working your territory, where you're setting appointments, where you're working different regions of your territory or specific groups of your customers, and then doing cold calling and other appointment setting around some of those core calls, and that's even going to help you with your time management if you're really working your calendar and working ahead. I know that seems like a given, but so many salespeople are weak with regimen one, and I'm convinced that they need to own it. Regimen two, prospecting, prospecting new or penetrating existing accounts. This could be different. In the equipment industry, many times you might have territory reps, and then you have account reps, so the prospecting might be a little different for those. Territory reps may be out there stirring up, they may have 300 or 400 accounts, where an account rep may only have 20 or 30 major accounts, and they may not do the same kind of prospecting, but I do want to make something clear. When you think of a prospector, the first thing that typically comes to your mind when you're thinking of a prospector is somebody who's a gold prospector. Where do gold prospectors hunt for gold? Do they just go out in the field and start digging a hole? No, they go where the gold already is. So even an account rep needs to be prospecting. They need to be penetrating existing accounts, developing new contacts within those accounts, selling a broader product line and services within those accounts, and then leveraging relationships to expand on corporate, multi-location, or national accounts. Account reps need to prospect too. Now it's obvious that territory reps need to prospect, so let's just look at a couple of the things that they can do, some actions that can really help them prospect effectively. First of all, and this should be part of the definition of their regimen, to do some research. Utilizing UCC data, Dodge reports, the phone book even, and the internet. Doing job site research, stopping in on job sites and questioning the supervisor about bids and who got bids and who are some of the construction people that are working on this site, following up on deals and even a lost sale to follow up and find out what happened and what you can do to improve research. And then networking, building deep relationships within your accounts, expanding contacts, expanding leverage, making cold calls and dropping in on areas where you say, man, that guy's got a couple of machines, I'm going to stop in there and see what they're all about. I just had a guy that just finished a training event with me. Him and one of his sales people went on a job site, started talking to somebody about a skid steer that they saw. And they were just asking questions and they were shutting up and letting the guy talk instead of presenting their brains out. They were really digging in when it was all over and they didn't even hardly have to present their company. When it was all over, they got a $3 million deal. Because they were out there networking, finding out what was going on. Before I move on to any other prospecting actions, I want to make something clear. Sales people could, and I hate to say this, but it's true, they could not do any of this. When the economy's good, get away with it. Not do any research, not do any networking, just kind of respond to stuff that comes in and people call them up and they go out and visit people and they could be working their tail off, but they're not in control because they're only reactive. And if the market grows 20% and your sales go up 20%, you really didn't do anything. And then when it dies off and when the tide goes out, you're going to be in trouble. Warren Buffett said, when the tide goes out, you find out who's been swimming naked. Folks, these regimens need to be done even when we're crazy busy. And that also includes cold and warm calls, drive-bys, if you've got lag time in an area, stop in and see somebody, telephone selling, calling through research, lead list, unqualified leads. There's so many areas that a salesperson can be stirring up business. Just systematically, if a salesperson has 360 accounts, that means they should be calling on at least one of those a day or maybe seven of those a week and figure out, that might be their regimen, say every Friday in the afternoon, I'm going to call through at least seven of my accounts, touch base with them, see what's happening. Systematically work it through. And I'll tell you what, if you do that, you're going to call somebody in there, I mean, you're going to get a bunch of people say, oh, no, we don't need anything, or you may find out they're out of business or the guy died. Or somebody may say, man, I can't believe you called me. We're looking for a couple of wheel loaders right now. And opportunities will happen when you do it. Regimen two is essential, prospecting. And let me tell you, when things are busy, that's the first regimen, if it's not a regimen. And if you haven't made a conscious effort to do it, it'll slip through the cracks and six months will go by and you will not have done it. And then you're going to have a big hole in your pipeline somewhere down the road. These regimens are vital. Okay, let's look at regimen three, evaluation of territory and accounts. This part of evaluation of territory and accounts is periodic and ongoing A to Z evaluation. What I mean by this is however many accounts a salesperson has in their territory, they need to know what's going on out there. That info is powerful. You can't buy that information by purchasing a list. The only way you can get that is if the salesperson is beefing up their CRM, adding information in about customer contacts, competitive information, lost sales, and actually looking at machine population data, all that information has to come from the salesperson. So if they've got 300 accounts and they're just calling on 20 or 30 of them, just the ones that are hot that are the big sales accounts, there could be one in there that they never call on that could be a multi-million dollar account. They need to get their arms around their territory and know who's out there. Now, I worked with one equipment dealer that their management said, man, regimen three, we've been expecting our salespeople to do that for a long time. Every year in November, they need to go through all their accounts and they need to meet by December with their manager, go through all their accounts, and then lay out a forecast and a plan and some strategy for the next year. It's a great thing that management said, man, you need to do this. This is important, but here's what happened. The salespeople just did it because they told them. They conformed. They didn't transform. They obeyed. They didn't own it. So what happened is they started scrambling at the end of November and just like, oh man, I've got to meet with my manager, I'm going to make some numbers up here and just keep them happy and get them off my case because I've got too much other stuff to do, and they just pencil whipped a bunch of numbers, sat down, just made up a bunch of stuff and guessed on a bunch of things. What they should have been doing is doing this all year long as a regimen and working through all their accounts systematically. So that's my challenge in regimen three is to figure out what that looks like, sales professional. How often do you call all these accounts? How are you going to systematically go through so that at any given time when your sales management says, what's going on with this account, you know, and you can look at your call reports and look at your trail of calls to them and see how your strategy is unfolding. Folks, already we've seen regimen one, two, and three, and now regimen four. These first four regimens are all territory planning issues. Again, territory planning issues that I guess if you really weren't paying attention you could let them slip through the cracks, but it'll bite you sooner or later. So this regimen four, evaluation of territory and accounts, and by listing, grouping, and prioritizing accounts. This is really important. Some companies already have these kind of assignments in play, and their CRM is already designed with groups of A accounts, B accounts, C accounts, et cetera. So I just want to put it this way. If your company has already established those guidelines, and those are just guidelines. They shouldn't be rules because there are some A accounts that maybe say I should call on them once a week because it's an A account, but maybe some A accounts you shouldn't call on once a week. You could bug the tar out of them doing that. There are maybe some C accounts that you need to call on a little more regularly because there's some huge potential coming up down the pike. It's very flexible, but those are just some guidelines. If your company hasn't defined that, I'm going to challenge you as a professional salesperson, if you're listening to this, to do it yourself because it should be a regimen. First of all, define account grouping and tiering criteria. What's an A account? What's a B account? What's a C account, et cetera? You can include, for that criteria, you can include sales, margin, potential, maybe a specific market or product focus, like if there's a certain product that you're really trying to push, that's one of your premier products, maybe you pick accounts that use a lot of that product as an A account. It may not be high in sales, but it may be a market or a product focus, or maybe even competitive situations. You define the criteria for A, B, C, D accounts, and then you document some guidelines for call frequency. In other words, how many times do you call on an A account in a given year? Is it once a week? Is it once a month? What does a B account look like? And then link all that to your calendar. I'll tell you what, you will see how powerful this is because what it's going to do is it's going to have an impact on your time management because you can't call on all the accounts as an A account. And by the way, when somebody contacts you and asks for a quote, and there may be a lot of people asking for quotes that are really D accounts that are sucking up all your time, that are just shopping around for pricing and have no intent to buy from you, and you're spinning your wheels doing the wrong things. Your territory is running you instead of you running your territory. Now, how do we get control of that? These last two regimens will really help us begin to do that. The first of these two regimens is regimen five. This is vital. This is vital account strategic planning. This regimen is about selecting an appropriate quantity of key accounts and really working them. Now, when you think about this, I'm sure everybody that's listening to the stream of this or that's listening to this live can think back in their territory and say, okay, yeah, that account right there, that's a huge one. That should be mine. I don't know why we're not getting it. We fit with them. That's a huge account, and it's a mixed fleet. I don't know why they're not buying from us. We should be getting a huge chunk of that business, especially in excavators or wheel loaders. I'm sure all of you can think of accounts that you say, I should have them, and they're huge, but let me tell you something. Those major big accounts are not going to land in your lap. You're going to have to do them on purpose, and the scary part of that is that the selling cycle for that is really long. Especially in these major accounts, let's just step back, first of all, and look at the sales lifeline. Let me give you the definition of the sales lifeline. The sales lifeline is the total sales activities timeline throughout the life of long-term customers. What this shows are all the activities that a professional salesperson needs to make sure they're getting done. Sometimes we think, well, my job is just to sell. There's really three major categories. The first one is marketing. This includes some of those planning disciplines in regimen one through four that we talked about, research, networking, prospecting, and cold calling, and really to increase your participation in the marketplace by doing that prospecting, which is going to not only increase your opportunity in getting in deals, but hopefully increase your market share overall. Then you need to know who's out there. Part of your marketing function is that territory evaluation we talked about. How can you market if you're not marketing the right places? You need to do territory evaluation, A to Z, you need to list, group, and prioritize your accounts. If you're doing that, and if you're evaluating your territory, listing and grouping, and then you're researching and prospecting, what will happen is you'll identify customers and you'll identify opportunities. That begins the selling cycle. Once you call up a customer and they say, hey, yeah, we need a couple of excavators, that cycle begins. Then ultimately, as you move forward in that, you'll lock in that piece of business. You'll open that relationship or lock the sale. That's going to continue throughout the life of long-term customers. That's a beautiful thing because somebody needs a couple wheel loaders or a couple skid steers and you do that with them, and you work the deal out with them, and then they end up hopefully buying those pieces of equipment from you. Then maybe a couple months later, something else comes up, and that's a beautiful thing because once you prospect and do your marketing, then what happens is that selling cycle begins and then continues throughout the life of long-term customers. At any given time in your CRM or in your pipeline, you're going to have lots of different deals that are at different stages in that cycle. What happens is you develop a nice customer base. Maybe you've been in your territory a while or you picked up a territory that was somewhat mature. Then you're going to get into the serving mode. Here's what I want you to see. This is where you have accounts that are in a maintenance mode. You're servicing them. You're following up. You're protecting them. you're reselling your value to them. Making sure they continue to love you and making sure that they continue to give business and nobody steals it away from you. You're maintaining those accounts. That's a beautiful thing. That's like an annuity that continues to keep going. But here's the danger. You can get caught up in that serving mode, work your butt off for day after day and go, man, I really worked hard today. I put in a long day. But then you look back and say, but I didn't do any selling. And by all means, I didn't do any marketing. No prospecting was going on. I wasn't doing any of those disciplines. I was just putting out fires and responding to stuff and dealing with my existing accounts, which you've got to do that. But if you don't have regimens established, then all of a sudden you're not going to be healthy. Or what's going to happen is something's going to go wrong and a couple of those accounts are going to go out of business or you're going to lose and then you've got nothing to fill that pipeline. Even when things are good, you have to do all three parts of this sales lifeline. This is the total sales activities. Now, one of the ways that you can do that marketing is by continuing to serve deeper into the account by maximizing, penetrating the account, managing your relationship with them using CRM, forecasting and even restructuring your company, which is the ultimate way to serve the customer and cover your territory better. And so what happens is that you've got this mindset of saying, I've got to do all this stuff. And if you can't get that done, you're working with your management and saying, I'm getting so caught up in dealing with these accounts, we've got to work with the service manager or something to take some of this load off so that I can do what I've got to do as a salesperson. Marketing, selling and serving. Now what I like to do is help you just to realize how complicated this can be. This is a moving target because once you get some good business, then you've got to say, I haven't been doing marketing. And then you do marketing and that's going to stir up a bunch of opportunities which are going to make you so busy that you won't do marketing anymore. And then you're going to have to put out fires. Look what Sun Tzu said from the art of war, ancient Chinese wisdom from the 6th century. He said, war is very complicated and confusing. Battle is chaotic. Nevertheless, you must not allow chaos. War is sloppy and messy. Positions turn around. Nevertheless, you must never be defeated. Chaos gives birth to control. Fear gives birth to courage and weakness gives birth to strength. You must control chaos. And how does Sun Tzu say that we control chaos? Planning. This depends on your planning. That's why those first four regimens of territory planning are so important. That's why this next regimen of planning is so important. Strategic planning. So let me use a bit of a football analogy just to kind of help everybody understand this concept. First of all, when you look at the very core of the selling part of your function and we see the selling cycle. Once you identify a customer or identify an opportunity, that begins the selling cycle. Now that cycle may last an hour if it's a rental situation or it could last six months to a year in some accounts to really get the business could take a couple years to actually get the touchdown and get that business. So what a lot of times sales people do is say, man that's a big account. And so they just go in there and call on them every week and do the bomb or the Hail Mary. And they just make calls. No, we've got to think strategically and act tactically. Think strategically, act tactically. Because throughout that cycle and as you can see on the screen, you're moving it down the field. Each time you have an interaction with the customer, that's where tactical selling takes place. Each of those interactions is tactical selling. And we're going to talk about that with regimen six because that's what moves it down the field. You can have a great strategy, but somehow you've got to execute when you get out there on the field. So the sixth regimen is non-negotiable. It's significant to be able to prepare and execute your game plan, to be able to run your patterns in your offense and execute on the field. But if you kind of step back and look at tactical selling, tactical selling is what happens in each of these unique interactions throughout the cycle. And by the way, every one of those calls are different, but every one of them count. So Don Buttrick can't tell you what to say. What I'm going to do is give you a framework and offense to help you prepare and execute your selling. Each of those calls is where tactical selling takes place. If you back up even further, selling strategy is your plan for the selling cycle. It's your game plan to move down the field. And this is really important because in all of our, when we see opportunities, when we have deals out on the street, when somebody's looking to buy something, that begins the selling cycle and we need to think strategically and act tactically. We should do that on all of our accounts. And actually, just to kind of take you back to the sales lifeline, strategic selling is your overall plan for the selling cycle. Now, here's the situation. We should clearly, as professional sales people, we should be thinking out, what is my overall goal in this account? What am I trying to do? And what are all the steps that are going to get me there? We should be thinking strategically in all of our business. But what I've found is, that's kind of more than a salesperson can, if they haven't been doing that, to bite that off and start doing it. So let's walk before we run. And that's part of what this Regimen 5 is all about, is to say, man, when you look at your territory, probably 80% of your business comes from 20% of your accounts. Or 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your accounts. I would even say that 80% of your problems come from 20% of your crybaby accounts. So with that said, we need to make sure that we focus on the right things. Let's focus. So if you look at your territory, let's say you had 400 accounts, or 200 accounts, whatever the case may be. If we could just say, yeah, we've got to deal with all those accounts, we've got to deal with all the incoming opportunities and all the incoming quotes, etc. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to pick three, maybe five, maybe seven major opportunities that are never going to land in my lap. And I'm going to do strategic account planning in those. I'm going to focus on a few accounts and do formal strategic planning. Now, one of the tools that I provide in the handouts is a tool 3.1e. It's an Excel document that I'm going to quickly walk through and show you all the 10 tabs that are in this Excel document. But one little caveat here that I want to make clear. If you have a CRM that you're using the functionality and the power of that tool, you can actually adapt this template and say, well, man, most of the information in here is all stuff that we put in our CRM anyway. And if you don't have a planning tool in there, there's probably a way that you could get with your provider or customize it to make sure that you can do formal strategic planning. And I'm not talking about just following existing deals. That's more of that in process pipeline. I'm talking about pulling up an account and proactively planning in it. And you can actually use your CRM to do that. And I've worked with a lot of dealers who have done that. But you know what? If not, at least use this template to do that. Now, the first eight tabs of this template are just like basic information, who the account is, what the location is, maybe an overview of why you picked this account, the status, what's going on, problems, objections, opportunities, preferences, what's happening with the competition and kind of why you see this as a major account because they use a lot of this product or they do a lot of rent to rent or whatever. And then who are all the players on their team? The bigger the account, the more players there's going to be. You can't just have one little contact in there. There may be the brothers. It could be the father involved in the business. It could be the wife. It could be the fleet manager and the purchasing agent. There could be numerous people that are involved. And as you start researching that and beefing up your information and adding that into this tool or into your CRM, and again, these first few tabs, these first eight tabs are all just gathering information, which is actually going to lead to your strategy because you go, oh man, Sam Smith, he may be involved in this. I've been dealing with his coworker who's kind of been my ally there, but Sam, maybe I need to set up a meeting with him. So when you start looking at all the players on their team and all the players on your team and other divisions of your company or maybe your product support salesperson or your service manager, and you start looking at all the players, then you've got to be the quarterback. And you've got to figure out how am I going to really make this happen. The next few tabs within this tool would be what's the competition doing? And you don't have to put this into the tool. You could just look up on your existing database, but look at recent sales, see if there's some trends up or some trends down or particular products that have dropped off or changes that have happened in their buying cycles. Look for things like that. What are some of your goals? And maybe a little what-if analysis. What if our manufacturer came out with an improved product here? Or what if the competitor or salesperson ends up retiring? How's that going to change this? So you're just researching. These first eight tabs were all about research. Now the next part of this tool is plan, development, and monitoring. And really this involves just coming up with some ideas, some strategies, brainstorming, and the most important part of this is this last thing here, sales call objectives. Now this is where you kind of need a page within your CRM to say, okay, now that I've researched everything and I've kind of laid out some ideas on how to move the ball down the field, now what are those steps I need to meet with Sam Johnson and I need to try to get him to do a demo? I also need to set up a meeting with our service manager and this operator and work out this problem. And you start laying out your step-by-step plan in that account. That's a beautiful thing when you do this. So let me just kind of walk through and summarize how you can really begin formal, and this is an important word, formal strategic account planning. Each salesperson pick an agreed amount of accounts to work on. This should be based on corporate goals, sales management directives, and definitely involve your sales manager in that. Then document those selections. Make sure the whole team knows that these are strategic target accounts including parts, service, etc. Make some initial calls to qualify them, and then complete the planning tool. That's the last page on this document, which I'll show you in just a minute, where you kind of lay out your step-by-step plan, or hopefully you can even do that within your CRM. Then you've got to stay on top of these. You've got to monitor the progress monthly or quarterly with management, maybe have some regular meetings and brainstorm some ideas with your team, share ideas, successes, and you've got to really do ongoing work on these. These are big accounts. They have a long selling cycle with a lot of players. They're not going to land in your lap. You've got to work tenaciously. Now keep in mind, you've got to keep doing all your other sales activities. You've got to still keep doing all your other responsibilities, but this is like your 401k or your SEP investment accounts in your territory, where you're working them long-term, and I promise you they'll pay off. Eventually that strategic thinking will bleed over into all your selling, and you'll start thinking strategically and acting tactically. Now, just a quick note on this before we move on. Laying out this plan, who's the contact I need to call on, what's my objective, what's my estimated call date, when did I accomplish that, and what were the results and next steps. In an Excel document, you can add rows in here as it progresses, and you can see your progression in your plan. If you plan your work, and then you work your plan, I'm going to promise you something. Every dealer that I've worked with who has embraced this regimen and said, man, that makes sense. That just makes sense. We've got to do all our other day-to-day stuff, but let's formally plan. Let's create a page like this in our CRM where you can pull that page up for a specific account that's been flagged as a strategic account, and let's plan our work and step it out, and then work our plan. It'll evolve as you go, but I promise you if you do that, a year from now, you're going to be thanking me. A year from now, you're going to say, man, I picked five accounts, two of them turned into million-dollar accounts, and a couple of the others are ready to bust open. Powerful. That regimen is vital. Regimen five is vital. Now, let's look at regimen six, which really ties it all together. Whether you're prospecting, whether you're calling on a strategic account, whether you're calling on the phone to qualify that account, every time you have an interaction with a customer, that's tactical selling. This next regimen is the most essential, really this non-negotiable part of your selling. It's how will you pre-call plan for every proactive call? That includes proper time investment to say, okay, what's my objective? What am I going to say when I walk in the door? How am I going to run this call? Pre-call planning is essential. Let me just give you a perspective on the sales lifeline again about what tactical selling is. Tactical selling is, okay, strategic selling is that big picture of the whole selling cycle. Tactical selling is what happens in each of those uniquely different calls throughout the cycle. It's your plan for each sales call. Every one of those calls count. Some of them are do or die, but every one of them is different. What I'm proposing, and I wrote a book on this recently. You can check out my website if you're interested in getting the book because it's an easy read, but it's powerful because it's a simple yet profound process to help you prepare and execute highly effective selling. I'm also, just for the sake of all the AED attendees that are watching this now or streaming on this, I want to make this tool available over in the handout links as well so that you can have access to this simple, but yet powerful, profound tool. Here's what this tool could do. When you're getting ready to make a call, you say, okay, what am I trying to get done here? What's the action? Because if you don't know why you're there, they don't know why you're there. This call helps you document what's my sales call action-oriented objective because I want to get action. I love the word interaction. The last part of that word is action. If you want to get action, you have to be a master at the interaction. But if you haven't practiced your offense, if you don't have an offense, if you haven't prepared it and practiced it until it becomes instinctive and automatic, and that's what this tool is all about, then there's no way that you can get the action because the interaction is just shooting from the hip. You're just showing up and throwing up instead of making sure that you effectively interact and that you dialogue instead of monologue. Instead of just presenting your brains out, you're really understanding the needs of that customer. That's what this process can do. It'll help you say, okay, what's the action? What am I trying to get done? What am I going to say after I get past the small talk that will get this thing started? What are some of the things that I'm ... What is that sentence, that phrase, that very concise, short, sweet, and to the point that I'm going to say that'll get the ball in play, that'll put me on the offense? Now, I'm not talking about being offensive or being manipulative. I'm talking about getting on the offense. Here's what I've observed with a lot of salespeople. Believe me, I've been with a lot of salespeople out on the field. I've seen thousands of videotaped role plays and I've watched what salespeople do. Typically, they get in front of a customer and they're just fighting an uphill battle. They're just trying to address stuff and trying to respond and they're getting grilled instead of saying, what am I going to say that will get me in control of this call so that we can really find out what's happening and we can really get to the bottom instead of just hoping that it works out? Hope is not a strategy. We want to find out what's really going on. That begins by having an action-oriented objective and then figuring out, what am I going to say once we get past the small talk or once the customer picks up the phone, what's going to come out of my mouth that will attract them and get the ball moving in the right direction? Then step two, evaluate. What are some of the questions that I'll ask that'll get the customer talking and find out if they're the decision maker, find out what politics are going on, to find out what they really need, not just specs, but also find out how their business has changed and what's going on and how they make decisions and what the competition is doing and what they need and what they wish they had. Evaluate and I always tell sales people, ask more questions and shut up. All this tool is, is a way to figure out what I'm going to say and then what are some of the questions I need to ask. By the way, this is not a script. It may look like a script, but what it is, it does have some elements of a script. What it is, is a conceptual outline of the expected dynamic interaction with key parts of it perfected so I know what I'm going to say to start, so I engage the customer. I have some questions lined up. If I put those questions in the right order, I may ask an open-ended question, the customer could start spilling his guts or maybe he's a little hesitant and I kind of prime the pump a little bit and ask some more probing questions and get them talking and build some trust and some rapport before I ever leverage my benefits and my company features and my product features. See, that's step three of the process. This is a systematic and logical process. It's a framework. It's a conceptual outline to help you prepare and execute each uniquely different call and get on the offense and execute it brilliantly. The key to great selling is to prepare and execute your selling. The days of winging it are over. No more pulling it out of your back pocket or somewhere close to there when you make a call and hear me. I'm sure some of the sales managers will be shaking their heads yes on this. A lot of salespeople, even veterans, have started to ride on their product knowledge, their application knowledge, their experience, their personality and all they do is they present their brains out. Instead, we need to be consultative salespeople and regimen six, establishing pre-call planning where you prepare what you're going to say. Now, I know it's very dynamic and you can't necessarily script out a sitcom. I say this, but you can have your parts of it perfected so that the likelihood of you being in control and being a true consultant is there. Many coaches have said this. I think Bobby Knight said it while he was throwing a chair. The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win. I'm sure a lot of you out there listening today got in on this webinar because you're saying, I need some help. I need to establish some disciplines. My time management is out of control. I'm scrambling and I want to win. If you want to win, then you're going to have to do the grunge work. Jerry Rice had some of the greatest hands in the game of football. He was gifted. He still has records that nobody has gotten near touching. You know what? In his first season, even though he was gifted, he was dropping a lot of passes and something clicked in him. He realized that it wasn't just going to be his talent in catching bricks that was going to help him be successful in the NFL, especially since he came from a small college and was kind of an unknown. Nobody was going to give him much of a chance. You know what? He had the most rigorous workout schedule in the NFL. That guy worked so hard and look at the numbers that he produced. The harder I work, the luckier I get. It's all about establishing regiments. It's all about establishing disciplines. I'll tell you, the pre-call planning tool, establishing pre-call planning is the key to all the other regiments. Every interaction you have with a customer, you need to nail it. Why pre-call plan? I came up with some very important reasons why we need to pre-call plan using this simple but profound tool. It's going to give you a better message. It's going to be concise. It's going to be focused on the customer instead of you and your needs and your commission and your product. It's going to be focused on their business, their product. It's going to be adapted to their personality style, not yours. It's going to make your calls shorter because you're not going to dance around and go down rabbit trails and go off on tangents. It'll be focused on them. You know what? The calls might even go longer because of that, which is a good thing. The customer will say, hey, they give you a little 10-minute stand-up meeting out on the job site, but if you focus on them and you have a good start and you start asking some really well-crafted questions and it's about them, what happens to that 10 minutes? It ends up being an hour. Then you end up going to lunch together. Why? Because you respected the customer's time and pressures. It wasn't about you. It was about them. You're not the typical salesperson coming down the street. You've got a professional, high-standard image. Ongoing, this tool will provide structure for good selling habits, and it's repeatable. Every call is different, but this same framework can help you say, okay, for this person, for this call, what am I trying to get done? What's the first down? Instead of the Hail Mary, what's the first down? What am I trying to get done in this call? A realistic but aggressive objective, and then what am I going to say to get the ball moving in that direction? What are some questions I can ask to find out what they're really thinking and what's going on behind the scenes? You can use this for every call. Managers, can you see how this is going to help you coach? Instead of just opinionating, now you have a standard tool, a framework, so that when you get back in the car, you can say, okay, how well did we run that interaction? Man, your start was a little bit long. Maybe you should have asked a couple questions here. Now we have a tool for coaching and team selling. Can you imagine how much better your calls are going to be when you make joint calls with your product support rep, or your outside salesperson, or your manufacturer rep, which sometimes those end up being just horrific calls because we're not on the same page. Team person takes the lead, maybe the person that shouldn't take the lead. Team selling of a consultative approach so we can prepare and execute together. Here's the best part of this. It works. It works. It gets the sale. Start, evaluate, leverage, lock. What a powerful, powerful tool, and that's all part of regimen six. Let me go back and kind of wind this down the last few minutes of this webinar and say, if you'll take this tool, the Vital Regimens tool, it's a two-page tool with the six regimens that we talked about in this webinar, disciplines, that you implement doable, realistic regimens, and you start doing them, a lot of your problems are going to go away, just like my health problems went away. I'll tell you what, my cholesterol level went from borderline to perfect. My blood sugar levels went from really high borderline to perfect. All the numbers started falling into place when I started doing the healthy things as a way of life. This is not a way of death. This is not a way of punishing yourself and saying, oh, so you're asking me to do more work as a salesperson? No. I love being a salesperson, and I know you do too, but we need to be healthy. We need to establish those regimens. I hope you do it now. I hope that as soon as you close down this stream or hang up from this webinar, you do it, because Balthazar Gratian, a 16th century Spanish writer, penned some very haunting words. He said, a wise person does at once what a fool does at last. They both do the same things, only at different times. You know, Peter Drucker, the great quality guru, said this. He said, unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes, but no plans. Gordon B. Hinckley said, you can't plow a field simply by turning it over in your mind, and so the choice is yours. Coach Lombardi said, I would say that the quality of each person's life is the full measure of what that person's commitment is to excellence and victory, whether it's in football, whether it's in business, politics, government, or I would add sales. In your company, in your dealership, and in your career as a sales professional, standardize the structure, tools, and disciplines of the four pillars, and in particular, after this workshop, I challenge each of you to do the vital regimens. Do them on purpose. Come up with a prescription that is doable, and make it a way of life. Become a sales professional. If you look at the left side of your screen, there's a link. You can click on that link after this is over, and we'll leave it on for a few minutes. You can click on that link, and it will take you to a website where you can download all of those tools and start using them. It's up to you. If after this, you say, you know what? This is a great hour, but my people or myself, I need more training. AED Foundation offers, and it's all available through AED. You can contact me and just tell me that you're interested in this. The Four Pillars of the Sales Profession is a two-and-a-half-day intensive course that we offer a few times a year. The next one's March 1 to 3, which is right around the corner. I have a few seats available in that, or May 24 to 26. You can register online at my website. Put up in the browser, slash register. It'll take you right there. Just note that you're with AED, and we'll make sure AED gets credit for that. If you have any questions, you can call me. We want to help you become a true sales professional. Folks, thank you for being a part of this webinar. I hope it has a huge impact on your career, short-term, and by all means, long-term. Do the regimens. Come up with a prescription, and get healthy in your sales. Again, I'm Don Buttry with Sales Professional Training. Thank you for joining us. If you have any questions, you can call AED or call me. Thank you for being a part of this AED Foundation webinar. www.aedfoundation.com

establishing regimens

disciplines for sales professionals

construction equipment industry

proactive activities

Four Pillars of the Sales Profession

personal disciplines

relationship skills

strategic selling

tactical selling