“Consider your starting position. Don’t start off on the easy foot. Find a way to add a little bit of resistance to your sales flywheel. Find a way to start from being comfortably uncomfortable and watch yourself grow as a professional salesperson.” – Tim Barnaby in today’s Tip 1479
How about you? Are you comfortably uncomfortable?
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1455. Take Action On Your Decisions
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Tim Barnaby. Tim helps sales professionals break through the procurement barrier advising on better sales presentation from discovery to final negotiations. He’s also the host of the Win The Deal podcast. Here he is:
Tim Barnaby: Are you starting your sales process from a position of being comfortably uncomfortable? Hello, Daily Sales Tip Community. Tim Barnaby back with another Daily Sales Tip.
My very first tip submitted was Episode 1455, and back then, I took inspiration from our local priest. Well, today I’m taking inspiration from my cycling class instructor. Now, every week, whether somebody is new in the class or not, he gives us instructions on how we should set up our bike for the ride. And there are two instruments on each bike that he explains to us where we should have them positioned. There is a silver handle and a blue knob. He tells us to shift both of them all the way to the left and then to begin cycling. So it’s a really easy feeling because there’s no pressure at all on the bike.
When we start to turn the blue knob to the right, we will start to feel a little bit of pressure. It will mainly be felt in our quads. And as he describes it, once you have that feeling in your quads, you should feel like you’re comfortably uncomfortable. Or as he describes it, it’s not too easy, but not too hard. There does need to be some resistance on the flywheel. And the reason for this is because as we go through this cycling class, we’re going to have the ups and the downs. We’re going to have times where we’re riding on the flats, and there’ll be other times where we’ll be climbing. Or there’ll even be times where he’ll have us in a really hard gear where the silver handle is turned all the way to the right, and we’ll feel like we’re riding through mud. But as he gets us going up and down and through the path, we are at a baseline where we know we started out at that comfortably uncomfortable feeling.
So how does this relate to sales?
Well, what is it that you have to do in your daily sales routine that perhaps you aren’t starting from that uncomfortable feeling? It’s easy to start with the stuff that we already know, but how do we grow and push ourselves past our limits if we don’t start from a comfortably uncomfortable position. So if cold calling is the difficult task for you, is that what you start your day with, where you’re not absolutely 100 % sure on how the calls are going to go, but you know how to make them and you just have to push yourself past the limits a little bit. And maybe this week it’s only one. Maybe you just want to start your day with one cold call until that becomes comfortable, and now you need to push it to 2, or 5, or 10, whatever that baseline is, because as time goes on, the baseline will become easy, and now we need to push our limits and dial the knob a little bit more to the right so that you become comfortably uncomfortable.
As you continue to explore what that feeling is, you will find that you will be growing more in the role, and you will start to see that you are becoming even more comfortable with the tactics and the processes that you are following for your sales process.
Consider your starting position. Don’t start off on the easy foot. Find a way to add a little bit of resistance to your sales flywheel. Find a way to start from being comfortably uncomfortable and watch yourself grow as a professional salesperson.
I’d love to know what it is that you’re going to do to push yourself to a new baseline. Where will your new comfortably uncomfortable starting point be? What’s the task at hand? Shoot me an email. I’d love to hear from you.
Scott Ingram: For a link to connect with Tim on LinkedIn and tell him what your new comfortably uncomfortable baseline is, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1479 there, you’ll also find a link to his Win The Deal podcast. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!