© Ron Chapple | Dreamstime.com

Vince Lombardi, the great Green Bay Packers coach, once said that football comes down to only two things: Blocking on offense and tackling on defense, and those are the basics his teams spent 80 percent of their time on in practice.

Red Auerbach, who coached the NBA’s Boston Celtics to eight consecutive championships, is known for having players practice shots over and over again from very short distances and even while standing right under the basket.

Lombardi, Auerbach, and all other great coaches have always taught the importance of focusing on the basics in order to be successful. In this respect, business and selling are a lot like sports. It’s often been said that the one key fundamental principle of business is: Focus on the basics, and the same is true for selling. Never is that more true than when times are challenging, as they are now. When it comes to sales and selling, there are certain key fundamentals, or basics, to follow that ultimately lead to sales success.

The Basics to Sales Success

Basic Principle 1: Plan your work and work your plan.

You have to start every day with a plan. Know how many leads you need to get and how many sales you need to make in order to reach your annual income goal. Break these goals down to yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals and evaluate them at the end of each day to make sure you’re on track. Your objective should be to exceed these goals.

Basic Principle 2: Spend more time on your most important tasks.

The three activities you should be spending the majority of your time on during the work day are: prospecting, presenting, and closing. That’s it. Everything else should be delegated or done during off-hours. Now we realize the world isn’t perfect and things will come up that you need to handle. At the same time, if you’re focused on these three activities and adamant that you will do as much of them during the work day, avoiding procrastination and other time wasters, you’ll find it will do wonders for your business.

Remember: sales IS a numbers game. Yes, relationships and quality are important but to have the relationships and the quality you first have to be talking to lots of people. It’s simple, the more people you talk to, the more business you will do. As an expert networker once said: “If you get your face out there enough you’ll eventually run into someone who needs you or knows someone who needs you. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

Basic Principle 3: Get back to personal communication and build relationships.

Today we have a plethora of technology devices at our disposal and there can be a tendency to use them too much. In-person communication has been replaced by e-mails, text messages, video conferencing, and sometimes, little or no communication at all. Now is the time to make more in-person visits to customers to say “hello,” drop off the proposal instead of mailing or e-mailing it, and to follow up in person instead of trading voice messages or faxes. Hand-written notes are also rare these days. You should be sending hand-written thank-you notes, birthday cards, holiday cards, and anniversary cards on the anniversary date of the day you started doing business with someone. Your objective is to have more personal contact at a time when your competitors are calling less and being less personal.

At the end of the day, it’s all about people and relationships. You have to connect with people on a personal level and stay in communication and continue to build the relationship.

Basic Principle 4: Get better at selling.

When times are tough there tend to be fewer prospects and fewer opportunities, thus you must do better with the ones you have. The fastest way to get better at selling is to:

• Make sales a study.
• Do what the top salespeople do.

Become a student of selling, be a sponge, read, listen to, and watch anything you can on the subject of selling. Next, find the top salespeople in your company, your industry, and in other industries. If they have books, CDs, or other programs, invest in them and go through them thoroughly. Call them on the phone, e-mail them, or otherwise get in touch with them and ask them what makes them successful. It’s simple, if you do the same things as top salespeople, you will get the same results.

Basic Principle 5: Work hard and smart.

We talked a bit about working smart when we talked about finding the top salespeople and doing what they do. It’s simple, success leaves clues. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel and you don’t have to, simply find out what makes the top salespeople the top salespeople and do what they do. You also want to use best practices in your industry. Look for ways to work more efficiently.

In addition to working smart, you have to work hard. This is particularly true in tough times. You may have to make more calls and work more hours in order to find the prospects and make the sales. In addition, every day you have to work hard on your mental attitude, on keeping negatives out, on staying motivated, on building your network, on making the calls, and on everything else that your selling career involves.