“My passion is performance. My mission is to have everyone I work with improve their ability to access their ability. ” – Paul Clarke in today’s Tip 851
How do you improve your ability to access your sales capability?
Join the conversation below and learn more about Paul!
Paul Clarke on LinkedIn
CONNECT Performance
CONNECT Performance Vimeo
CONNECT Performance on Twitter
CONNECT Performance on Instagram
Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Paul Clarke. Paul is a human performance coach who operates at the intersection of the worlds of sales and sports performance. He brings the science of human performance from the world of sports performance to the world of the sales professional. Here he is:
Paul Clarke: Sales leaders globally share some common problems and frustrations. You’ve concerns about the productivity and performance of your sales teams. You’re not competing in the market to the level you’d like, and you’re likely having difficulty retaining and/or attracting talented people. I developed the connect business to help sales leaders and their teams, and we work with the obvious intersection of the worlds of sports performance and sales. That’s the whole area of human performance.
Across many roles in sales and sports performance over 30 years, I’ve seen some really careful people produce some really good days. But then I weigh these with many mediocre days. The huge frustration was not really knowing the reasoning behind these roller-coaster days, weeks, and months. I suffer this pain myself. You know you have the capability, but it’s just not happening. On many days I felt like I was driving with my foot on the accelerator and brake at the same time, literally spinning my wheels.
In the sports performance career. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some consistent high performers, and for sure, these people work on honing their skills and capabilities. But far more of the focus went into making sure they were ready to perform and that they had the ability to access the capability. They simply focused on controllable aspects of their daily lifestyle and made sure they were in complete control in each of these areas by virtue of their lifestyle choices.
Taking this back into the world of the sales professional was like a new dawn. Focusing on simple lifestyle changes meant that my levels of engagement, energy, and motivation went up, and so too, did my ability to perform well daily.
So what are these controls that we can all leverage and how can you go about it?
We’ve developed a solution factor around 3S of human performance and well-being.
1. Stress. There’s nothing wrong with stress. We need in order the power forward and help us lead the pack. But too much of it for too long can mean we’re burning out instead of burning bright. Quite simply, you need to identify what causes you and your ongoing stress. The next step is to examine if you have enough moments and balance of recovery during your day.
Think about it. You’d never see a high-performing athlete being always on. So why should it be any different for high-performing sales professional?
2. Sleep. What we do between 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. is largely dictated by the performance state we can access on this performance state is heavily influenced by what happens between 9:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. the previous night and morning. Sleep is vital for anyone trying to perform to a high standard and not just the right quantity of sleep, but appropriate quality in your sleep to help you recover and restore your body battery. You need to understand the factors that affect your sleep and learn how to enhance its restorative effect.
3. Staying active. Good fitness levels are important for good overall health. A sedentary lifestyle feeds a feeling of lethargy and low energy. By itself, this brings about a decline in our ability to access our capability. You need to look at your physical activity profile and discover if you get enough physical activity and learn to exercise at a level appropriate to your current fitness level.
What I’m sharing with you now are the personal performance principles that could be successful for the sales professional. Not only does the environment dictate performance, but lifestyle does too. The result of focusing on the 3S is people who move from playing at a 5 or 6 out of 10 level, up to high performance, 8 or 9 out of 10 level every day. You feel more nimble, dynamic, and energized and see daily professional performance that delivers better results and a decline in cost of wellbeing issues like burnout.
My passion is performance. My mission is to have everyone I work with improve their ability to access their ability. Daily performance is not as elusive or happenstance as people might think so much in our control that we’re not necessarily controlling. But until now, there hasn’t really been the form of tools or process to make this obvious and easy for people to take action on. So to bring alive your professional capabilities, you need to work on what’s under the hood, the engine that powers your ability to access your capability.
Start today and invest some time looking at simple lifestyle changes in the 3S principles: Stress, Sleep, Staying active. You want to be a high performer. So you need to invest in being ready to perform and in the controllable that support consistently good performance and outcomes.
Scott Ingram: For more about Paul, CONNECT Performance, and his Nine to Thrive program, just click over to DailySales.Tips/851 and we’ll have links to everything for you there.
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!