“You need to slow down. You need to take up space, and you need to be able to think. You’ve earned the right, you deserve that time, and your prospect needs you to do your very best work.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 1709
Are you in a hurry when selling or doing something?
Join the conversation below and be sure to join his newsletter.
Jeff Bajorek Website
Jeff Bajorek Newsletter
Jeff’Bajorek on LinkedIn
Submit a Sales Tip
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 thought-provoking tip comes from Jeff Bajorek. Here he is:
Jeff Bajorek: I work with a lot of reps who are quite frankly, in too much of a hurry. They are prospecting, and their prospect actually picks up the phone, and so they hurry through their script and their talk tracks to schedule that meeting. Or they get into discovery and they’re so concerned about asking all of their questions that they forget to wait for good answers. You don’t usually do your best work when you’re in a hurry. I’m going to encourage you to slow down, to take up space, and to think. And believe it or not, your prospect actually needs you to do that because that’s what they’re counting on you for.
Now, I learned this lesson in an unlikely or from an unlikely source, in an unlikely place, for that matter. I got my degree in sports medicine, and so I did a lot of work with orthopedic surgeons and on the sidelines of games. I was the guy that would run out there and address or assess an injury on the field. You’ll see us on TV occasionally. And as part of that, I felt like I had a lot of responsibility. I had a lot of things to consider. I had the safety of the situation, the safety of the athlete. What about the evaluation of the injury? There are a lot of things going on, especially when you’re 21 years old. This is the thing you’ve been spending your entire college career preparing for, and now it’s time to sit for a certification exam.
Well, on my internship in South Florida, I worked very closely with an orthopedic surgeon, and this orthopedic surgeon was kind enough to sit with me and help me prepare for my exam. We spent some time between a couple of surgeries, and just sat in the lounge and he quizzed me on things. I will never forget this lesson. He says, Jeff, put yourself in a scenario. There’s an athlete down on the field. You’ve got to go out there. You’ve got to spring into action. You’ve got to go do your thing. What’s going on up here? As you could imagine, in the brain of a 21-year-old kid trying to impress somebody, trying to show that person how much they’ve learned, I went through this laundry list of thoughts, this little checklist of things that I needed to be aware of and concerned with.
And he says, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out. There are a couple of things you need to consider, and you have not considered any of them, even though you tried. So let me help you. He says, First and foremost, you have to identify, is this a life-threatening situation? Is this a life-threatening injury? Well, if the athlete is rolling around holding his or her knee or ankle or something, Probably not. So you can eliminate the worst-case scenario from your mind. That’s a good thing.
He says, Now, is it a limb-threatening injury? Is this a limb-threatening situation? And Jeff, there aren’t very many of those. Maybe a fully dislocated knee, a fully dislocated elbow. Okay, those are limb-threatening, but those aren’t that common. And from your vantage point, if you’re paying close attention, and from what you see as you’re running on the field, you can probably to produce a lot of that. So if it’s not a limb-threatening situation, get that out of your mind.
He says, And now, by the time you get out to the athlete, if you have assessed whether or not it is a life-threatening injury or a limb-threatening and it’s not either of those. Slow down. It’s your game. That athlete needs you to be in the right frame of mind. That athlete needs you to not be frazzled. Their teammates, their opponents, their opponents on the field, all of those people, none of them matter because it’s just you and your patient. It’s you and your athlete. The rest of that other stuff needs to go away because it just doesn’t matter. I think about that now. I think about that when my clients ask me how to slow down, how to be patient, where I learned that stuff. It comes from, again, a non-sales-related career path that I took. Because when it gets right down to it, when you’re in that moment with your prospect, you’ve earned the right to have their attention.
Don’t throw it away because you’re worried what other people are going to think, because you’re worried about all the things that you have to do. This is where it’s important for you to be present. Make sure your head is where your feet are. Make sure that you are continuing to earn that attention. It’s not some finite thing that is just going to expire. You’ve got 30 seconds, whether you like it or not. No. Use those 30 seconds that they give you to earn 30 more, to earn 30 more, maybe to earn 15 minutes or 30 minutes next week so you can earn even more of that attention.
I had a mentor who used to say that he could make the sale. He could make the sale of the product that we were selling in 2 hours. It’s just that they came five minutes at a time. So there were a lot of little interactions, but every five minutes was an opportunity to earn five more minutes. When you think about the time that your prospect gives you in terms of what you’ve earned instead of in terms of what you could throw away or what you could waste, all of a sudden, there’s a mindset shift there. You need to recognize that your prospect is giving you a platform. It’s your job to earn it, and then it is your job to help them understand that you deserve more of that platform. If you don’t believe you deserve the time that you’ve been given, why on earth would your prospect? And what about hurrying through your talking points suggests that you deserve the opportunity to deliver them?
So I’m going to go back to what I said at the beginning of this video. You need to slow down. You need to take up space, and you need to be able to think. You’ve earned the right, you deserve that time, and your prospect needs you to do your very best work. You don’t do your very best work when you’re in a hurry, and I would just question why you feel like you need to be in a rush all the time. Slow down, take up space, think. You’ll sell better because of it.
Scott Ingram: For more from Jeff, including a link to join his newsletter where he shares ideas like these every week, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1709. Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!