Doing Average, Will Get You Average Results | Performance Improvement Plan

A big shoutout to the HubSpot Podcast Network for supporting this episode. Stay inspired with more podcasts that help grow your business at HubSpot.com/podcastnetwork. Today's principle is that average action will always get you average results. Most salespeople barely hit their quota and that used to be me as well. It wasn't until I started becoming more unreasonable with my expectations that my income started to explode. The cold hard truth is that what you did to have success during the good times is not going to be enough to make it through a recession. Therefore, you need to become unreasonable. Unreasonable with your levels of action. Unreasonable with your assertiveness. Unreasonable in taking new approaches that you hadn't considered previously to find and close new business. Practically this means 5 things – 1– Longer hours You may have to work longer hours at least at first to start testing what works and what doesn't in this new selling environment. How you generated leads during easy times is unlikely to be effective when you try implementing it during a recession. You’re going to find that prospects want to speak to salespeople even less than before. I'm not saying that you should reduce the amount of sleep that you get each night so that you can squeeze a few more hours of prospecting each day. What I am saying is, that you will need to uncover new ways of achieving your previous level of results. 2– Then become lazy Counter the first point, as soon as you uncover a better way of finding and closing new business you need to become lazy. Uncover the 20% of efforts that is getting you 80% of your results and focus in on that. Ditch the crap that isn’t crushing it. Then a few weeks later, find the 20% of effort that is getting you 80% of the results within your new process. And continue this until every moment that you are working in the new selling environment, you're generating meetings and progressing sales to a close. The recession that we’re in is not like COVID. During COVID the advice from sales experts was to stay in touch with prospects, even if they weren't buying from you in that moment and to start to build stronger relationships with them so that when the money starts following, your deals will come back to life. COVID however was a completely different environment to a real recession because it was artificial. Governments were stopping people going to the office, the public could not spend their cash the ways that they would usually do so. So the market was artificially held back for 12 months. This time around we have an organic and completely natural downturn in the economy. Companies still have cash; you must work out the most efficient way to get in between the problem they have and the solution they need so that you can accept payment for solving their pain point. 3– Lose the losers This next point can be a tough to implement but has a dramatic effect during a reccession. We've all heard the saying that you are “the average of the five people that you spend the most time with”. There is also science to back this up. Most people earn between plus or minus 20% of what their parents earn for example. What does this tell us? This tells us that we need to stop spending time around people, influencers, and media that are not helping us progress towards our sales goals. That includes any colleagues who are panicking about their performance right now. It's very unlikely that spending time with individuals who are panicking is going to improve your chances of smashing quota. So don't do it. The same goes with cutting out the news and social media. Ignore all of it, get your head down, complete the sales activities that lead to success in this new economy, and you'll be just fine. 4– Minimalism Step four follows a similar pathway to step three.