Process versus Pointless

I’ve long been amazed by how different a winning salesperson’s thought processes can be when compared to their lesser-achieving counterparts. I was summing this up for someone unaware of the workings of the sales world the other day, and used the ‘serial as opposed to parallel’ analogy.

Thinking ‘in series mode’, you focus on the task in hand to the exclusion of anything else, upstream or down, left-field or right.

Thinking in parallel, you complete a specific task in the context of other tasks that you determine need to be accomplished.

The latter mode is overwhelmingly the way to go to predicate selling success, time after time.

You should know if you’re in debilitating serial mode. You may think you’ve made some  progress after a certain call, meeting, email. But in reality, you’re static. Gone nowhere. Nothing has actually moved forward. What you’ve done is really just pointless.

Parallel mode is all about navigating a process. You are constantly aware of where you, compare it to where you need to be, think ahead and tweak as you go as necessary. It is the only way.

Is your current campaign on the right process track, or was your last transaction just pointless?