“Make sales fun.” – Darcy Smyth in today’s Tip 678
Do you use games to motivate your sales activity?
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Darcy Smyth on LinkedIn
The Sales Game
Why Bravo
2021 Sales Success Summit
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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 my good friend, Darcy Smyth. Darcy is the create of The Sales Game. With a specialty in the psychology of sales, his understanding of the workings of the human buying mind have intrigued clients all across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. Here he is:
Darcy Smyth: I want to give you a tip that if you’re listening to this around about Christmas time or just before, which is when it’s being recorded, it may be a well-timed daily sales tip for you. Cause it’s around the idea of motivation, particularly at times when you’re feeling the slump start to come, or you’re feeling those times of lull, perhaps it’s the trough out of the peak and trough time in your sales career or in your sales cycle. And that is this it’s to make sales fun again for you. And in most specifically making the achievement of sales results fun. And then even more specifically than that, it’s making the parts of the sales process fun that aren’t necessarily to do with closing the sale, because we all love closing the deal. That’s when we celebrate, that’s when we get to look good, that’s when we get to put it up on the whiteboard, that’s for many of us when we get paid, but if all we’re ever looking forward to is the moment when we close the deal, the moment when we get paid, then that kind of means like 99% of it the other stuff that leads up to all of it becomes kind of boring kind of style. And in terms of the peaks and the trough, it’s like our troughs and our valleys get very, very deep and our peak is kind of high for like a moment and then that’s about it.
So it’s really key at times like this, if this is something that you’re experiencing to make sales fun for yourself again. I remember when I first started learning sales and getting into the game of sales, when I really didn’t even know what really selling really was as at its essence at its core, I would love getting my hands on anything. I loved making mistakes. I loved screwing it up. I loved getting feedback from a mentor of mine that could tell me a way to do it better. I loved learning about a new way that I could understand the brain and the mind and the triggers that lead to buying behavior. I thought that was the most fascinating thing in the world.
Well, some years on, as you tend to get further and deeper into a field, you sort of normalize and habituate to a lot of that stuff. And so it isn’t as exciting as it once was. Well, what if there was a way to make it exciting again, what it, and it’s like, “Yeah, it really does. It’s kinda gotten boring. Like I’ve tried making it fun. It’s like, yeah, I get kind of bored.” And it’s like, “Yep, I totally get it. I do.” But there is ways that we can make it fun. We can make, for those of you familiar with the terminology, we can make the lead measure fun. And the lag measure, just the icing on the cake. The lead measure, being all the stuff we do that’s part of the process that leads to the result at the end of the day.
Now this includes things like booking meetings. This includes things like getting a no, this includes things like doing a zoom call, sending a personalized video, sending some direct mail to a client, booking in calls with people that could be a potential referral, are getting a referral, sending a referral, all of the sales stuff that could be kind of boring, or you could be getting kind of just used to. And it could be part of the lull that leads to the sales at the end of the day.
What we do at our company, Why Bravo, where the creators of the sales game, there’s a chance you will have heard of it. If you’ve been hanging around Scott Ingram in this community long enough, and he’s a brilliant community might I add-in, we tend to gamify sales training. Well, this isn’t what this is about. We’re not going to go into the sales game and stop men for self-promotion, but what we do to excite a lot of teams and motivate them and give them a bit of a fun injection around their sales processes is we do, what’s called an Outbound Royal Rumble. And it’s something that you could do very easily with an Excel spreadsheet, a phone in your hand, and pen and paper kind of ready at the go.
So what we do with Outbound Royal Rumble is we say to everyone, what are the day-to-day sales activities that you want to motivate yourself or your team to achieve? And all we ever do is we put points associated with each of them. An example is, is this a closed sale over the value of $2,000 equals 25 points? Okay. A booked meeting equals 10 points. Asking for a referral, gets you five points. A direct video, like a personalized video or something really personalized and hyper-personalized to a client or a prospect, gets you three points. A voice memo, which is a little bit safer to do than a video talking rejection wise, because you have to show your face on-screen gets you two points. You can do them on LinkedIn. You can just send voice messages on LinkedIn and you can send videos on LinkedIn, by the way. Now I just discovered last week as well, which is pretty cool for those of you that don’t know. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. That’d be worth three points if you were to do it. And one point for a passive outbound, which is like a text message or an email or whatever it may be.
And what happens is you can play against your fellow sales team members. You can play against yourself to beat your own record from last week. For those of you that are golf fans out here, myself, and my business partner, Steve Flavin, you know, you understand when you’re playing golf, you’re just trying to beat yourself. Kind of that’s really the most important thing. And so as for some people that are geared that way, and don’t really like competing against other people, although in the sales world, that’s rare. So it should be, it’s always a bit of more fun. When others around, you can try and beat your own records. You can try and beat the company records. You can come together as a team and try and score a record. Just last week in our own company, we hit a thousand points in a two-week stretch. And so we’re going to reward ourselves with a holiday to the North of Queensland here in Australia because of it, right?
And so things start to become a whole lot more fun. If you game-ify and add points to the process, it’s nothing major. It’s nothing complex. It’s nothing complicated, but we have found both within ourselves and in working with the teams that we work with, that they are so motivated purely by a leaderboard and the idea that they could potentially climate. And I think that’s what we’re all about as salespeople. We love getting better. We love comparing ourselves to other people and having a bit of healthy competition. We love knowing that the winner at the end of the day, because of it is our buyers and our clients, because we’re connecting with them more often and we’re finding new ways to actually generate a connection with them. And that’s another thing that we found through playing this Outbound Royal Rumble is essentially this, the more we do it if you’ve sort of run out of your pipeline, you’re like, wow, I scored 500 points last week, but I’ve got my pipelines dry now. I don’t know what I’m going to do when we play this game next time. Well, it forces you to come up with new ways, new innovations, new models for connecting with buyers, creating new pieces of value that you can go out to the market with to send, to give away for free. If you need to, it drives innovation. It drives behavior. It drives competition. And it’s all fun, engaging, and inspiring at the same time. And I don’t know about you, but I feel as though there is no better learning tool than playing games. You make mistakes, you stuff it up. It’s fun along the way. You don’t have to take it too seriously. And the thing with a game is you can always have another shot. You can always have another chance, and there’s always someone at the top of the leaderboard that you can learn from and understand what they’re seeing that you’re potentially not.
So give it a go. The outbound Royal rumble, we’ve called it, that you can call it whatever you would like, but start adding a bit of fun, put a prize up for the winner and enjoy the results that come your way. Appreciate the opportunity to give you the sales tip and all the best heading into Christmas, if you’re listening to this now, if you’re listening to it later on all the best for wherever you are in the year and here’s to your sales success moving forward. Appreciate it. See you at the Sales Success Summit soon enough. Cheers!
Scott Ingram: For more about Darcy and The Sales Game, which we’ll once again be playing at the 2021 Sales Success Summit. Just click over to DailySales.Tips/678.
Then, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!