3 lessons I learned from The YinYang of Sales Training Bootcamp

I attended the YinYang of Sales Training Bootcamp on 23 – 24 November 2018.

It was an interesting and informative piece of process delivered by Stephen van Basten and Vinesh Maharaj.

The two of them have a great interplay and are a humorous and convincing duo. I’ve never been on a training where there are two facilitators. It worked.

Stephen spoke about the inner game and Vinesh took us through the sale process.

I learned many lessons from the sales training bootcamp but 3 stood out for me based on where I am in my sales journey.

3 Lessons

Design a compelling elevator pitch

Of course this is not a new concept. The goal is to be as brief as possible but to inspire the person you’re pitching to become curious enough to want to speak to you at a later date (the actual appointment). I was at an advantage to the other delegates as I’ve been working on on my brand promise and an elevator pitch with personal brand strategist, Dawn Klatzko.

Doing it again at the sales training bootcamp, I realised that it’s still not where I want it to be, but it is starting to take shape:
I’m Jacques de Villiers – Rainmaker.
I’m really good at helping companies and individuals maximise their sales results
I know that there are others who do this, but what makes me different and unique is that since 1998 I’ve spent 100s of hours actually selling in the trenches, I’ve led 10 sales teams and presented more than 1 200 programmes from Malmesbury to Milan.
It’s my job to set you up for sales success, both professionally and personally.

A good elevator pitch should be like a woman’s skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials. (liberally translated from the quote by Ronald Cox (A good sermon …).

We can all sell but we don’t have enough prospects to sell to

It was once again highlighted that I’m by far not getting enough prospects into my pipeline. Without prospects and without appointments you cannot bless your potential clients with your product or service. It was hammered into the delegates that we need to make a disciplined effort and block of time every day to connect with new prospects. Interestingly, what I got out of it is that we ‘bless our prospects/clients with our products/services.” If you look at it through the ‘blessing’ lens, then it is our duty to get in front of as many prospects as possible. I’ve realised (again) that it’s imperative to make prospecting the #1 priority in my day. So, it’s time to put on my big boy underwear and start sucking up those rejections.

State management

We went through a NLP process (Neurolinguistic Programming) to anchor a positive state. The idea is that if we are going to be in a peak, positive state, we need to anchor that state and be able to call on it at any time, especially when we face rejection, despondency and disillusionment. We had two different trigger points. The first being the right wrist where we anchored our ring of power (self confidence, self-esteem and enthusiasm). The second being our left wrist where we anchored the skills of selling so that we could be excellent influencers and persuaders.

There were a lot more valuable lessons in the sales training bootcamp and each delegate took away something different to meet the challenges he/she faced.

I thoroughly enjoyed the bootcamp and believe it is well worth attending, particularly for new sales professionals who still have to learn the actual skills of selling.