Welcome to the Finding Business podcast. Five minutes that will help you learn something new about attracting ideal clients and accounts. I’m your host, Scott Channell. For more about this show, episodes, and services offered, go to Scott Channell — with two t’s, two n’s, and two l’s — dot com. Now, on to the show.
Want to be a top producer? Make more calls. Book more meetings. Just get more experience, log more hours. That’s the comon advice. It’s simple. It’s measurable. And almost every sales floor in America runs on it.
Here’s the problem. If hours made people great, the rep with twenty years would always beat the rep with two.
Does that match what you’ve seen?
Every sales floor has someone who’s sold the same way for a decade.
Plenty of hours. Same results. Never a top performer.
And every so often, someone new passes them in a year.
I coached a rep selling dividend products to financial advisors. No prior sales experience.
None. And that rep became a top producer within a year.
Not by out-dialing everybody. By walking into every call prepared and making small improvements consistently.
Top performers know this. Hours don’t make you better.
Hours spent the same way just reinforce the same habits. They keep you right where you are.
And the research confirms what top performers already know. Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues looked at dozens of studies on practice and performance.
In the professions, hours of practice explained less than one percent of who performed best.
Less than one percent.
So if volume isn’t the answer, what is?
The answer is targeted work. One weakness at a time.
Here’s what that looks like.
Pick a recent call. Not a great one. An ordinary one.
Listen back, or walk through your notes. Find one place it was weak.
Maybe it was a follow-up question that never got asked. The buyer said something important, and it never got explored.
That’s your focus for the next two weeks. Just that one thing.
Write down the follow-up that should have been asked. Then prepare two or three more like it before every call.
Say them out loud until they come out naturally.
Then review the next call. Did you ask the follow-up question this time?
When that piece becomes routine, pick the next one. Your opener. Your transitions. How you handle price. How you ask for the next step.
Notice what’s happening. The hours didn’t change. The focus did. Every hour now goes to finding one weakness and improving it.
The rep who makes a hundred calls the same way gets a hundred repetitions of the same habits.
The rep who fixes one thing at a time gets better every month. And each fix makes the next one easier to see.
That’s what top performers do. They don’t count their hours. They count what got fixed.
For the next month, stop counting hours. Count fixes. One call reviewed. One weakness named. One fix drilled until it’s routine. Then ask yourself: when did another month of just logging hours ever do that?
Hope this got you thinking. For more information about this podcast, episodes, and services, go to Scott Channell — with two t’s, two n’s, and two l’s — dot com. Thanks for listening.
