Cricket Test Survival Equation

Phew. England finally produced something to salvage a smidgen of Ashes pride Down Under.

Against the odds, batting out the final day in Sydney to save the game and avoid the almost ritual latter-day whitewash when playing away.

England Remain Unbeaten In 2022, runs the meme.

It really isn’t easy on us fans back in the wintry, grey, chilly homeland.

Especially given that I’ve worked hard over the years to ensure I can see the action in a much more clement time zone. Even ‘live’.

One sports writer summed up the mental contortion required to assess the merit of middle-of-the-night viewing beautifully.

Here’s Andy Bull’s paragraph;

There comes a point on every Ashes tour when even the most ardent England fan has to ask whether the cricket is worth getting out of bed for. It’s a complex set of calculations in which you have to weigh the score in the series and the state of the game, the likelihood of the team being humiliated again, the ambient temperature of the bedroom, the distance to the TV set, the hour and whatever you’ve got on the next day. Exhaustion multiplied by dejection divided by hope. Whatever the answer is, it absolutely isn’t 36 for four off 21.5 overs, 3-0 down in the series, 380 runs behind in the match, at three in the morning.

That’s the time to make like the team have been, and roll over….

Luckily, what followed on the field of play was nothing short of miraculous.

I myself was taken back to the giddy days of the final Fifth Day at Newlands back in that scorching first week of 2010.

How bizarre that a draw that day can be celebrated better than the actual win a decade on was by us Mother Country-ers present.

Let’s examine that ‘complex set of calculations’;

Exhaustion x Dejection

Hope

There’s quite a lot to unpack there when bleary-eyed.

If even Ben Stokes couldn’t watch, sitting on the grass next to the boundary rope, then what hope has the fan?

We have our own selling ‘hope’. The desire for gaining a client. Winning a contract. Closing a deal.

In any Sales context, there’s the likelihood of success.

I would always say first that the overwhelming factor is adherence to you process.

And by process, regular readers will know that I absolutely do not mean any coaching guru or <small>CRM</small> vendor ‘system’.

Rather, how closely the bid maps onto the pattern of events that when in play, mean – as definitely as can be possible – you will prevail.

With our denominator sorted, how about the numerator?

There’s plenty of variables from which to choose.

To keep things simple, you could maybe try a pair like Urgency x Uniqueness?

Or perhaps play on the emotion and logic poles requiring satisfying. Fact x Feeling?

Or even go a little farther. Introduce another variable. (Fact x Feeling) + Fit?

Some treatments could be more slanted around an initial qualification. Others geared towards deal outcome possibility projection. In whichever ways you create your equation, it could be a decent way to have up your sleeve to look again at what’s either allowed or sitting already in your funnel.