Whether you are one of the faithful following the FIFA 2010 World Cup or one of the millions driven to distraction by the endless coverage in the media, the story of France’s rapid exit from the tournament is a sobering one for anyone in sales.

On June 22 the French national team lost to the hosts of the tournament South Africa. France are ranked 9th in the world and won the World Cup in 1998 and Euro in 2000. South Africa are 83rd and only rejoined world football in 1992.

Only a matter of days ago the petulant multi-millionaire France players refused to train because of a bust-up with their coach. Many of them are considered amongst the best players in the world and the weight of national expectation was on their shoulders. But still they did not make it past the first hurdle in the tournament.

Is your team full of winners but not a winning team? As Clive Woodward, the former coach of the rugby world cup winning England team said, the victory is in the inches not in the feet. It is the many small things that add up that create victory. And selling is ultimately about winning.

For every sporting disappointment there is a sporting inspiration. Greece in 2004 won the 2004 Euro football championship and the team had been written off even at the group stages. In their whole history they had only qualified for two major tournaments.

Salespeople need to learn to lock out distractions and each day recalibrate their attitude. We need to think about what is important today and what we can do to get the victories we want. To achieve those goals we have set ourselves. The big difference between the smaller and bigger football tournament teams is their motivation, hunger and focus.

In the case of France it is so easy to blame everything on the coach Raymond Domenech who has been in his position for 6 years. It is like blaming one’s personal failure on the sales manager when you have the autonomy to go out there and get the business. What a bunch of nonsense!

A former headmaster of mine used to say “excuses are lies”. And I never wanted to be a liar. What is more, we are all too often prone to blame our failures on others when hindsight shows we could have done things differently ourselves.

Examine all those small changes each day that could be regarded as Woodward’s ‘inches’. Do something a little bit better each day and you never need to wait for the big crunch moment. And don’t rely on others to give you motivation or direction. If they do – great. If they don’t, do something about it yourself. Let’s learn the lesson of France’s 2010 failure and emulate Greece’s 2004 triumph.

(this blog written immediately prior to England’s crunch match against Slovenia)

General Patton delivered this following speech to his troops during his phenomenally successful period as commanding general of the seventh army in World War Two. Steve Black sent it to Jonny Wilkinson before the Rugby World Cup final in 2003 that England won. I thought it worth repeating here in sales context to motivate us in these difficult times:

“Today you must do more than is required of you. Never think that you have done enough or that your job is finished.

There’s always something that can be done – something that can help to ensure victory. You can’t let others be responsible for getting you started. You must be a self starter.

You must possess that spark of individual initiative that sets the leader apart from the led. Self motivation is the key to being one step ahead of everyone else and standing head and shoulders above the crowd. Once you get going don’t stop.

Always be on the lookout for the chance to do something better. Never stop trying.

Fill yourself with the warrior spirit – and send that warrior into action.”

Have a look at this 20-minute video of neuro-scientist Jill Bolte Taylor describing the day that she had a horrifically debilitating stroke.

I spend a lot of words in this blog talking about how we think about the past, present and future and analysing how we can make the latter two better by considering the first of the three. However, Jill reminds us from her frightening personal experience how we can allow the creative and sensory right half of our brain to dominate every now and then and give the left hemisphere a rest…

An excellent introduction to the workings of the reticular activation system: all sales and marketing people need to know about this!

What is the most common mistake I see in sales departments? The mistaking of activity for results.

What do I mean by that? Put simply, good sales people are adept at seeming busy. They can show all the calls they have made, how full their pipeline is and how many appointments they had booked. But they claim they just “need that lucky break” whenever you quiz them about the lack of new business.

The attitude of being “busy being busy” is highly corrosive. When it gets out of hand the management can accept the excuses, even feeling sorry for the luckless sales people. But you don’t get rewards in sales for making phone calls. You get the rewards for closing deals (this is certainly the way it works in successful sales departments!).

If you are an individual, managing and motivating yourself, take a moment to look at what you do each day, each week, each month. Be hard on yourself and be objective. Are you attending a lot of events, persistently following up the same prospects week after week, adding new products to the portfolio, blogging (!) and spending a day going to see a prospect at the other end of the country?

Be really critical and decide where you should actually spend your time most productively. Stop doing the enjoyable things that you can’t prove to yourself actually yield business. Stop living on hope and being exhausted each day with no closed sales at the end of each month to show for it.

Begin to work intelligently and stop worrying about looking busy. You get paid for the business you write not the hours you work. You will soon start working smarter not harder and the revenue will follow.

I have been in property investment for some years now as well as running the training company and have watched as the market lurched from boom to bust. And I have marvelled how this sector seems to foster the best and worst in sales techniques.

I was struck by the recent news that 40 of the biggest house building companies in the UK have been fined nearly £130m for rigging the market. In effect, whenever one of them bid on a contract, they discussed the price with the others in order to push up how much the buyer paid.

Anyone who has had to deal with local builders will know that familiar sound of air being sucked between teeth and the inevitable comments about a job costing more than they thought! So, frankly, Balfour Beatty and the others were simply doing this on a huge scale.

Now contrast that with the concept of buying houses using back-to-back (or sandwich) lease options. Now I don’t intend to turn this into a property seminar so it is enough to say that this is a new way of helping sellers to get the price they want for a house, letting a buyer get a house and to make money as an intermediary. Everybody wins. The exact opposite of the house builders’ game of ‘heads I win; tails you lose’ as described above.

We all know the market is tight for a lot of products and services. This can be the mother of invention for new ways for you to sell your company and its wares. Alongside improving your existing routes to market, why not explore other ways you can help buyers to buy?

If yours is a high value capital good, maybe buyers just can’t get the cash to buy it. But they desperately want it. So could you find some way of letting them borrow it and pay for it over time? Maybe let them share with you a proportion of the cost saving or revenue generated? Alternatively, can you bring two different customers together and your product or service sits in the middle?

Try a little lateral thinking, in the style of Edward de Bono. Remember the saying “If you do what everyone else does, you will get what everyone else gets”.

Using some imagination costs nothing. Taking a risk might, but then again you might unearth another way to sell that will tide you through the recession and beyond. Build on what you have got and you might find the foundation of more stable sales.

This is a question that is often asked when I speak to managers looking to recruit. It is often uttered by operational staff and managing directors who resent paying salespeople their relatively high market rates. Sales directors sometimes even say it!

But firstly, ARE salespeople paid highly? Well a recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and publishing group Croner, entitled Sales Rewards, suggested that the average basic salary for a middle manager in sales is just over £38,000 – 5.6% higher than the national average for this level. Not a massive difference, but significant.

Interestingly, there are regional variations with sales reps in the North East and North West receiving 10% LESS than people at the equivalent level in other roles.

As a salesperson you are in the almost unique position in the business that you are constantly under the return-on-investment spotlight. Would an HR manager be constantly monitored to see that he was worth each year? Or the health and safety manager? Highly unlikely, even in these recessionary times.

However, the value of a salesperson appears to be easy to measure: if you don’t bring enough new sales to cover a certain multiple of your salary, you are toast!

On a strategic level, this way of thinking is incredibly inefficient and unfair. We are a sales training company after all so I not only have an axe to grind but can show it is not the most profitable rout. But let us put this to one side and deal with the issue head on.

Put simply, you need to show your managers the value you bring to the business. If you are regularly exceeding target all the time, then there is no issue. But, if you are like most salespeople, you have good months and bad months.

So be your own harshest critic: think carefully why you may have come up short. Don’t think of excuses; work out the reasons why. And take corrective action, before your manager needs to.

Sometimes the reasons for missing targets are genuine ones and unavoidable. If it is out of your control, see the storm brewing. Understand that the business demands (fairly or unfairly) that you return adequate return on investment. Start the dialogue with our manager early. Don’t let the threat of the axe come as a surprise.

Like it or loathe it, we need to constantly justify our value to our employers unlike other departments. But we do get better rewarded according to the research!

So often sales people focus too much of their attention on sales skills and believe that their mental state is not so important to their success. When we are training people in making cold calls, the frequent request is for “powerful phrases”, “clever responses” and “sentences that convince”. These are important but only secondary to the mental approach.

I was reminded a few days ago how important the state of mind is to success, more than actual skills. Usain Bolt on Top Gear in fact. For a little background, Usain Bolt is a runner who holds the world records for 100m sprint, 200m and 4×100m relay. Top Gear is a television programme about cars.

Usain recently wrote-off of a very expensive BMW in car crash from which he was luck to escape unscathed. This might call into question his ability to drive. His world records suggest he is not too shoddy at running.

When he recently appeared on Top Gear he was asked to drive a lap around a race track in an ordinary family car. Many famous people had previously performed the task and some impressive times had been set by these stars. Usain approached the driving task in the same way he did his running: he had a tangible and enormous will to win. He said as much to interviewer Jeremy Clarkson.

It was no surprise then that his time was nearly the fastest ever. He would have possibly set the record if he had not been a heavy muscly 6ft 4ins, the weight slowing the card down considerably.

Even if we factor in the possibility that he is a fast learner, there were few actual skills he could have transferred from running to driving at high speed. The main constant was his state of mind: the determination to win.

When making sales calls we need to be like highly trained athletes. We need to focus our subconscious minds on the result and allow our natural skills to align. Get the mind right, and the body will follow.

Have you ever had a prospect seem really keen to buy and then they disappear off the face of the earth? The were a “sure thing” when you put the phone down or left their office. Then you can’t get hold of them even though all you need now is the signature?

Possibly this is a version of “post-purchase remorse” that I call “pre-purchase remorse”. This first is a recognised psychological response to buying. Sometimes buyers start to rationalise their purchase and panic over a number of factors such as having spent a budget on the wrong thing, that they are no longer able to choose an alternative, what will the boss say, etc Other buyers almost predict this effect before they have even made the commitment to give you any money and behave as if they have “pre-purchase remorse”, in other words they regret that they are about to no longer have all the options open to them – including not buying.

The good news is that you must have done a good job as a salesperson because they must have been convinced by your arguments at the time. After all, they did not kick you out of the office or ring off. However, once they began to think about taking their interest to the next stage – in other words paying – they have become rabbits in the headlights. Almost paralysed. And that is why they don’t take your call.

Firstly we need to accept that some prospects have been in buying mode for a long time. Maybe they have seen and spoken to many representatives over a particular purchase they are considering. On some occasions we see “analysis paralysis”: they have so many options that they cannot now mentally process all the information. And this can lead to an irrational decision, rather than a well-researched one.

It is possible they have been doing this research for so long that they have almost become addicted to the process. In fact, making the purchase will end this process, which they have become very comfortable with. And making the purchase might put them in an uncomfortable place.

We can’t know for sure if a client has simply made a firm decision not to use our product or service, or if they are in “pre-purchase remorse”. If the latter, then they need a little more support and they will complete the purchase with us.

So, if you suspect pre-purchase remorse; confront it. Explain in an email or voicemail message that you know this is a big decision and that it should not be taken lightly. Then offer to provide some sort of reassurance. Cases studies or ”customers like you” (note the presumptive language) are one way to help reassure them. Let them know you are there to answer their questions. And be patient and persistent. You need to believe that they will see the light eventually, and you WILL get your sale.

A good friend of mine described a concept that is not readily translated from the Sanskrit into English. The word “dhairya” is generally translated as patience. However, it is a lot more than that. It is not a passive thing: in other words you sit back and wait. It is more a constancy of purpose and effort. Or to have the will to maintain effort through hard times when results might not be immediate.

I see the confusion of dhairya with patience frequently when it comes to sales. Maybe you recognise it in yourself.

That process whereby you wait for the prospect to come around; you don’t want to bother them too often in case you scare them off. That is patience.

The dhairya version is to keep believing the prospect will be ready to buy. But you need to DO something to keep that vision alive. You need to have a reason to contact them: useful information, chat about a latest industry development, refer a potentially useful partner to them, invite them to an event – social or business – that they might find interesting.

It is this ability to build long-term relationships that distinguishes the best consultative salespeople. It applies more to higher value goods and services where the margin justifies the ongoing effort. But even lower value goods can integrate the long-term marketing with the occasional sales call.