Are any of your sales reps following a ready fire-aim philosophy in their selling efforts? Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. And the reality of a lot of sales people is they tend to be intuitive and not as structured as they need to. So they tend to approach things with an immediacy of action, a ready fire-aim kind of philosophy.

Look what happens to so many salespeople, you walk up and you give a sheet of paper that has a new lead that just called in and wants help. How many of your sales reps would do any kind of research before they called the customer and would check on your computer system to see if they'd ever been a past customer or not, look online to see what they're doing and to see if you can identify any competitive products in their online activities, or at least a better understanding of their business and their philosophies?

But that isn't what happened for most people. You give a sales rep a lead, first they do is go over to the closest phone they can find and they give them a call. We need to make sure that we have our sales people acting on a more stable basis today, because things are such higher risk than they used to be. Customers are more prepared for a sales call. They're doing more research before they even call a salesperson. So by the time they talk to your rep, they've already done research and have usually a pretty good understanding of what they're looking at buying, and they're ready to ask some tough questions.

So what are you doing to help your sales reps be truly prepared for the calls that they make? By doing research ahead of time, checking your files to see if they have been a customer and just getting a handle on what the customer's doing so when you do go out there, you'll be more informed, you'll be more aware, and frankly you'll be more professional. Would love to know what you're doing with your people to help them increase and break this habit of ready fire-aim and increase their research and preparation for calls so they look better on the call itself. Would love to know how you're doing with this. Would love to answer any of your questions. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.