Sales Plyometrics

In the decade or so since hanging up my beloved sporting boots I’ve seen several fitness fads glow and fade.

Military pre-dawn bootcamps, H-I-T, pilates, zumba, even (the surely cheating) slendertone belts. Now I discover the latest; plyometrics.

Known as plyos to its devotees, the current spike seems in part due to triple-grand slam, double Olympic Gold winning and 2016 tennis world number one, Andy Murray’s current rehab from hip surgery. Social media posts of him swimming stroking with a canoe paddle alongside video doing handstands and rolls and all manner of unusual gym bouncing certainly raised the plyo profile.

Here’s a couple of remarks from Murray’s in-demand trainer, whose approach incorporates plyos, as spoken to bbc;

“Athletic normal is a place where you can express all types of movement literacy – such as jumping, skipping, falling, stepping or lunging – without reservation and especially without pain … You could push weights above your head to build shoulder strength or core stability, but a handstand does all of those things …”

Athletic Normal is a place where the world-class performers he helps repair happily return to moving without thinking, just as they used to, pre-injury.

So is Selling Normal a place where salespeople have trained to have underpinning confidence to – for example – handle all common objections, sketch any key description and tell just the right story for typical given prospect situations?

If so, how do you reach such pinnacle pitching?

A couple of years back I encountered an experienced, amiable Aussie salesperson. Happily trousering six-figure remuneration. They revealed to me in a moment of private candour, that they’d never drawn on a whiteboard. I found this hard to grasp. Yet then took every chance I could to ensure they had marker pen in hand at any opportunity in the office. Determined to make drawing presentation tricks second nature in the safe environment.

Then progressed to actual examples that could be replayed and developed in the field.

Can we re-package a mixture of modern-day refinements combined with more traditional learning methods to ‘go plyo’ in Sales?

As well as this simple whiteboard example, there’s all manner of video, peer review, practice, constant reinforcement, role-plays, demo spotchecks and general capture/share of best practice avenues.

Your ideal pitch components may lend themselves to random drills; from the more tired, like an elevator pitch, to the fresher, such as how to frame the ‘problem’ when talking first time to someone new. You might even have the like of corporate slides semi-mandated to show, frequent objections to handle or price list closing routines to sharpen.

I remember starting out and driving hours to meetings with appointed “mentors”. I’d want to practice how to say certain things. Rarely would my co-seller want to play along. Maybe not wholly confident they’d emerge with pride in tact, who knows. If only they’d have gone plyo back then. Time to make amends elsewhere…