Southwestern Sales Talk
Every summer I go to Sunday meetings to meet with students from The Southwestern Company. Invariably, at the beginning of their summer sales adventure, I hear discouraged rookies saying: “I’m just not cut out for this.” “I suck at selling.” “I hate this.” Or even, “My uncle needs me to run his ostrich farm…” During my first summer selling books, after being a professional salesperson all of 10 days (which translates to approximately 140 hours of on-the-job training), I concluded, “Lifeguarding was much more fun than this.”
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell‘s new book, Outliers, The Story of Success. One of his chapters is entitled “The 10,000 Hour Rule”. After studying numerous successful people, from Bill Gates to The Beatles, he concludes that is takes 10,000 hours of immersion into a skill area to achieve mastery or genius. The Beatles appeared to have come on the music scene out of nowhere, but they played and honed their performance skills sometimes 8 hours a night, 7 days a week in Hamburg, Germany. All told they were live onstage somewhere in Hamburg for 270 nights in a year and a half! (On a personal note, my old band only played live 9995 hours…which is why you’ve never heard of us.)
So, how many hours have you invested in your sales career? Have you gotten frustrated because you haven’t yet mastered selling or closing or prospecting? The old adage “practice makes perfect” applies to this skill area also. At the beginning of a Southwestern summer, most rookies do “suck at selling,” but they get better with practice. After 2 weeks, their 360th demonstration is far better then their first.
As one observer of the Beatles put it: “They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back.” Sounds like a Southwestern summer to me. So, log those hours; there is value to putting in the practice.
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I have been hearing a ton of good stuff about this book. I read tipping point, and still need to read blink and outliers. The 10,000 hours rule is quite profound because just like you said, I wasn’t very good at something the first time doing it, i.e. selling. Because in selling and recruiting, in order to be really good at it, you must actually do it a lot and put lots of work in. Not getting overly discouraged at first, but realize that I am going to still screw-up and will take awhile to master the skills. No one is naturally good at selling, but only good with doing the work to get the results.
Great articles, and keep them coming.
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Lee McCroskey Reply:
April 5th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Yo! Good response, thanks. Outliers doesn’t leave you with a to do list. There’s not much to apply except this chapter, but his findings are quite fascinating.
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Lee,
I love the Beatles! I think I want to grab this book right now. I think that putting in 10,000 hours into anything will get you to where you want to be. I think the road to mastery is far more exciting than being a master. We have to give ourselves pats on our backs for every hour we put in because practice makes perfect… or at least it gets us closer to perfect.
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I’m glad you finally decided to pick up the book! It helped me outline the part that both Peter and I did at the Recruiters Conference this past January. The night before I spoke with Kyah Hillis (who set a few previous sales records with our company earning somewhere around $80,000 her during a 3 month summer) and realized she is one of the few people who had achieved over 10,000 hours purely through selling 9 summers….Mastery pays well.
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I made a simple calculation (as I think all of You tried to figure it out) – how long does it take to become a genius in selling books!
72 times 13,5 (or 13) is approx. 1000h.
Gosh, Lee, You want to tell me that I have to sell 8 years more to master the hardest work in the world?!
NICE
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Lee McCroskey Reply:
April 10th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Yes, Maiko! Only 8 more summers to genius! I’ll send you several experienced dealer agreements….
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at 80 hrs/week, that’s 125 weeks. Guess I’m about halfway there after 6 summers…
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