Happy April Fool’s Day! A day for tricks – not just for fools as I don’t think I am a fool – though I have had many tricks played on me in my lifetime. As if four brothers didn’t have enough fun at my expense with their tricks, my husband picked up where they left off. When we were first married, he tied a rubber band around the sink sprayer in the kitchen sink. When I rinsed my breakfast dish, water sprayed directly on me. He did this year after year and I think it took me 6-7 years to catch on that this was going to be a “tradition”. 
6-7 years! No, I’m not THAT slow, but when some things happen so infrequently, it may take a while for us to identify that we need to be prepared for it. And in sales, we don’t have 6-7 years to figure out potential obstacles that we need to navigate through – even if they happen once a year!
What can you do to make sure you aren’t made to look like a fool in your sales? Prepare! Put some preparation efforts into your OVERALL sales process, approach and effectiveness. A few specific actions you can take:
- Review the tricky situations you have had in any of your sales contacts in the last few months – can they be prevented in the future? How?
- Prepare more strategically – step back from “what” you do and think about “how” you do it. Does your sales process work? Are there parts of it that need to be updated?
- Evaluate your tool box. How are you incorporating any of the Sales 2.0 tools into your sales activities? You can read more about Sales 2.0 tools in a post by Jill Konrath here.
- Engage other team members for feedback on how you can be more effective. Think beyond the sales team – what might you learn from marketing, customer service, QA, and other departments that you interface with?
Making the time to step back and look for seemingly harmless and infrequent tricks in your sales process and then removing these obstacles, will keep you fool-proof.
P.S. This year hubby is out of town and I did not have an early morning sink shower 🙂
