You’re correct if you think this is a confusing question.
But it is one that has significant impact on your sales process whether you are a salesperson or someone leading a sales team.
Think about the question in the context of how you drive. Is it easier to make a right-hand turn or a left-hand turn? It’s almost always much easier to make a right-hand turn, and yet too many times, we program ourselves to make left-hand turns.
Companies such as UPS, Coca-Cola and others found the value of asking themselves this question and it resulted in significant savings in fuel and time. By building their routes to only have right-hand turns, they were able to speed up deliveries, reduce fuel, decrease time and lower risk.
Ask yourself in your sales process how many times are you making left-hand turns. I’m not talking about when you’re driving, but in how you look at things.
Are there things you’ve been doing one way for years because you believe it’s the best method, when in reality there is a different way you could be doing it that would yield better results?
I agree if it was easy to answer this question you would have already answered it. But that’s the whole point. The best solutions are many times those everyone else overlooks.
It’s for this reason that I’m a strong believer that each year we need to look at how we do things and ask the tough questions. Should we actually be doing those things in the opposite manner?
That is what the right-hand turn does. It has you going in the opposite direction as the left-hand turn you were used to taking. The result you’re looking for is not the action itself — it’s the outcome of what you achieve from making the turn.
Don’t become a servant to the process. Rather, become a user of the process with the goal being to get you to an outcome.
What left-hand turns do you need to reverse in your sales process?
Copyright 2013, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
