Every day for 16 years I talk with salespeople. They are always asking “how do I become more effective at selling?” Now there are many perspectives, techniques, approaches and philosophies so I won’t go into that now. These are important but one of the fundamental question is how well do you know your stuff? One question I like to ask a group is what sports did they play in high school? I hear the usual ones like football, basketball and a few others. So I pick football as an example. What is amazing to me is that after 10, 20 or 30 years people can still name their favorite play and describe what was supposed to happen. Now if you were in band or a cheerleader or played a different sport this still applies. Can you name your favorite cheer, do you remember the song and can you still do the moves? Now that we have had a couple of laughs lets apply this to mastering sales.

Let me give you a quick little exercise so you can determine your level of mastery.  Pull out a piece of paper and in 15 seconds write down the steps of your sales process. Now look at what you wrote down and ask “would my boss and peers agree that those are the steps?” Here is my point…we can remember something we played for fun many years ago and we still have a modest level of mastery. Yet when it comes to our profession we haven’t mastered the steps of the sales process. We could apply this to objection handling, closing, product knowledge or number of other applications but the point is – have you mastered what is needed to be a professional salesperson?