Heavy Hitter Sales Blog

How to Tell Your Kids About the Recession

Parents’ natural instincts are always to protect their children. Keeping them from danger is an innate part of our human nature. But we’re in sales and the realities of selling in a recession are hitting home—less commission, longer hours at work, and frayed nerves. If you haven’t already, it’s time to tell your kids about the recession. Here’s some ideas that might help you with this awkward conversation.

 

Put it in Perspective. There’s an old saying that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours. It’s just a matter of perspective. These are tough times and while there is tremendous economic uncertainty, we have always made our way through challenges in the past. And, somehow we’ll do it again.

 

Explain What’s Happening. Your kids probably wont’ understand that the recession’s cause is a $32 trillion negative wealth effect from declining home values, weakened capital markets, and consumer debt load. But they do understand there are natural cycles to life like the four seasons. While winter time happens every year, a single cycle of the economy can take decades. We’re in the midst of economic winter, at the bottom of a cycle.

 

Cash is King, Avoid Debt. As winter approaches animals in the wild stockpile food. During winter they conserve what food they have. Similarly, we need to make every effort to save and conserve money whenever we can. The biggest lesson of all is to live within our means and avoid debt.

 

It’s Temporary. There’s a classic Merle Haggard song where he sings, “If we make it through December, everything is going to be all right I know.” Well, it’s true. These times won’t last long and we just have to adjust our lifestyle for a short while, maybe through the rest of the year. But next year will definitely be better.

 

The Ultimate Truth. Your kids are living in extraordinary times. In their lifetimes they will see incredible developments in technology and advances in medical science we cannot imagine. They will enjoy incredible careers doing what they love to do.

 

Your kids’ true heroes aren’t the latest American Idol winner or the Super Bowl MVP. It’s you. Your sacrifice and hard work is responsible for everything they have and everything they’ll ever do. And you did this for the right reason, because you love them.  Now you just have to make it through December.

Sales Intuition, Memory & Chester

 I consider myself fortunate. I have the privilege to work with the top salespeople at the world’s greatest companies. Yet recently I spent some time with the most motivated people I have ever met—the MBA students at UC Berkeley’s Haas business school where I teach the art and science of sales (Go Bears!).

 We had some incredible guest speakers this past semester. VPs of sales, CEOs, and  Chester. Chester fascinates me. You see, Chester Santos is the 2008 USA National Memory Champ. In a matter of minutes Chester can memorize a deck of playing cards, hundreds of random words, and match a mindboggling combination of names to faces. You can learn more about him by clicking here.

 

 As salespeople, we spend most of our time trying to predict the behavior, intentions, attitudes, and feelings of our customers. In essence, the goal of every salesperson is to be able to anticipate the future. The “tool” you use to accomplish this is your “sales intuition.” Memory plays a fundamental role in determining the strength of your sales intuition. The ability to store more sales call experiences in your memory will actually strengthen your sales intuition.  In honor of Chester, I once again share six principles to help improve your sales call memory:

    

Sensory information. During the sales call, consciously gather as much information as possible from your sight, sound, and touch senses. A vivid event is more likely to be memorized than a dull one, and the more sensory information that is incorporated into your memories, the higher your likelihood of recording it.

    

Association. Thoughts and experiences are more readily recalled when they are linked to a specific association. A very simple association would be the success or failure of the call. The association may be further defined by the customers’ technical and business requirements or their objections to purchasing your product.

   

Specificity. The persistence of a memory is directly related to the precision of details that are input at the time of the experience. During a sales call, you may even want to tell yourself that some information is important and is not to be forgotten.

 

Unique events. Many sales calls are free-flowing events that lack a strict organization of facts. Therefore, it is easier to remember any unusual and unique aspects of a sales call that stand out from the ordinary and mundane.

   

First and last. Most salespeople are quick to remember how a sales call began (the big opening) and how it ended (the grand finale). This is a natural characteristic of memory, whereby we tend to remember the information that is presented first and last more than the details in between. This particularly applies to longer sales calls, more than an hour. One way to help remember all of the in-between information is to mentally break the sales call into smaller segments (or chunks) either by time, presenter, or topic of discussion.

     

The good, the bad, and the ugly. Be forewarned, your brain has been trained to block out unpleasant images. However, it is critical that all information during a sales call, both good and bad, be stored.

  

Never forget, how something is remembered will determine how much is remembered.