by John Carroll

There are sports that inspire people, while others seem to frustrate them. For me, golf does a little of both. Many have written about the lessons about life one can learn from this game. Here are a few lessons in selling I’ve picked up by hitting (and trying to hit) that little white ball:

1. Warm up before you begin – As with most sports, it’s a good idea to set aside the time to get loose and warm up before beginning play. For me, this means arriving early enough to hit at least a small bucket of balls on the driving range, chipping at least once or twice and spending 10 minutes on the practice green. This time tends to help me get into the rhythm of the game and prevents the inclination to rush through the first few holes.

In selling, warming up before you begin can take many forms. It can mean rising from sleep early enough in the morning that you shake off the sleepiness and get your head fresh and clear for the opportunities of the day. It can also involve doing your homework on a new prospect in advance of your first meeting, fully prepared to incorporate what you’ve learned into valuable questions that go far beyond the typical, unprofessional question, "So tell me, exactly what do you make here?"

Stretching your mental muscles before you begin your selling day can include early morning reading, reviewing your goals for the day, the week and the month and sitting quietly for 10 minutes or so. This time of your own early in the day helps provide balance and a sturdy foundation for the ups and downs that selling tends to bring your way. With the proper mindset that can come with this prep time, you can handle virtually anything the world can throw at you.

2. Follow golf etiquette – Golf is considered a civilized game in which you follow the rules of etiquette and exhibit courtesy to the grounds and those around you. Knowing when it’s your turn to play, maintaining silence while others take their turns and repairing divots and ball marks are all examples of using your best manners on the course.

Etiquette in selling is subject to interpretation by the source. Lowest common denominators include listening when your prospect or customer is speaking, handling people who are irritated or angry in a courteous and constructive way and graciously accepting the fact that some people just aren’t going to buy from you today.

Many sales professionals practice their own personal code of etiquette. In a prospect’s office, some prefer to remain standing until a prospect has invited them to take a seat. At a business lunch, some always expect to pick up the tab unless it goes against the policy of the prospect’s employer. I’m glad to buy lunch for the value of having the client or prospect take the short time away from telephones and team members to address the topic at hand.

3. Focus – In golf, as in most pursuits, focus is all-important. Without focus, one is likely to spray shots to random destinations with little or no consistency. A swing resulting in a complete miss of the little white ball is a clear outcome of thinking about something other than the challenging task at hand. In golfing recently with a friend, I was reminded that it’s difficult at best to prepare to hit a tee shot by recalling the "37 things to do before you hit the ball." This well-intended exercise renders focus nearly impossible.

Focus in selling means, just as in golf, being where you are. If your selling at the moment involves dialing for appointments, you focus by sticking to your target number of dials for the day. You use what you know is the highest probability script as you get the opportunity to speak to your prospect. You ask for the appointment in that moment, not trying to sell your product or service, but simply gaining the agreement to meet in person. Straying from that single-mindedness in this instance often results in losing a prospect altogether, since it’s so much easier for a prospect to dismiss you and your offering via telephone.

4. Keep your head down – This is a prime example of focus, one that can make or break your ability to hit a golf ball at all, let alone sending it to the ideal destination. Those who have golfed know that by looking ahead to behold the flight of a beautiful golf shot, the golfer is instead witness to a dribbler, a dreadful hook or slice or even a complete miss of the ball. This is why you will occasionally hear an offer such as, "I’ll watch where the ball goes" to remind a person to keep his or her head down through the end of the swing.

In selling, keeping one’s head down means tending to the details of the opportunity at hand. The inclination to get ahead of oneself in the sales process abounds. Look at your own buying experiences. I vividly recall walking onto the premises of a car dealership and being greeted by a complete stranger who shook my hand while asking, "What can we do to make a deal today?" Since I was making a business call on the manager of the dealership, I wasn’t even in the market. That’s a complete miss on the part of the sales person.

You can keep your head down in selling by knowing your most effective sales process and sticking with the basics. Customers will tell you when they’re ready to move faster than you would normally expect. If you like to float an occasional trial balloon by asking someone to make a decision early in the sales conversation, just be ready for the dribbler off the tee. If prospects feel they’re being rushed to a decision because you haven’t yet reached what Alan Weiss calls conceptual agreement, you’re likely to lose the opportunity to have them buy anything from you.

5. Choose the right club – After you’ve golfed for a sufficient period of time, you begin to know which club has the right distance and flight pattern (provided you’ve hit the ball well) for the situation at hand. Knowing the club that can get you onto the green when you’re 135 yards away is very valuable, since you can hit your greatest shot ever with the wrong club for a particular distance and find yourself in deep trouble.

Choosing the right club in selling means having and applying the proper tool at just the right time to put you closer to your objective. Let’s use questions as the example here. If you know it’s time to get your prospect focused on his or her key challenge at the moment, you might pose the question, "What is it you’re thinking about when you’re lying awake, staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m.?" The answers you can get with this question are often invaluable in leading you to key buyer objectives. On the other hand, this same question, applied at the wrong time, can get you completely off track. This can be classified as what Neil Rackham, in his book SPIN Selling, calls a high-risk question. When it works, it does so beautifully. When it doesn’t work, it can send you so far off the track that it’s difficult at best to recover.

Here’s a scenario to illustrate. You’re with a new prospect, trying to uncover true needs to help you understand the exact nature of the prospect’s problem or challenge. You have already started talking about the prospect’s needs in a particular area with a general question that leads into problems that your product or service can solve. By asking the stare-at-the-ceiling question, you can get to the heart of the matter, sometimes very quickly. On the other hand, if your conversation has been very general in nature, the answer to this question could be something far from your area of expertise. If you’re selling business solutions and someone’s stare-at-the-ceiling issue is a family member who is ill, you’ve likely picked the wrong question for that moment in time. In most instances, you can recover, but you’ve likely lost any momentum and may have to work harder to get the discussion focused on areas where you can help solve problems.

The idea here is to know which tools work best in which situations. The best way to know with confidence is to use your best judgment, choose a question or question set in role play or real life, then reflect on your results in each particular situation. In sales just as in golf, there’s no substitute for experience. The lesson may come at some expense of time, money or opportunity lost; there’s rarely a life hanging in the balance.

6. Shake off the lost ball – I golf occasionally with my father-in-law, who eats, sleeps and studies golf. He watches as I more than occasionally lose a ball in the woods, the water or the shrubbery of a neighboring yard. He also jokes that, given the choice of feeding me or keeping me in golf balls, he’d choose the former because it would be less expensive. Based on his accurate evaluation of my golfing prowess, I feel qualified to comment on the lost ball situation.

If I were to fret over each and every ball I’ve lost on or near the golf course, my life would be considerably shortened and I would be no fun for several days after a round of golf. On the contrary, I celebrate those rounds where I’ve netted (read found as many balls as I’ve lost) even or better on the ball count. I consider every trip into the woods as an opportunity to find another poor soul’s lost ball, giving me the chance to put it back into play.

You haven’t lived until you’ve lost the ball after taking a similar shot in your selling. Losing the ball in selling means losing your prospect to any number of events. Perhaps you started selling too early in the process, before you fully understood what the prospect really needed. Maybe it was a failure to listen closely to the prospect’s description of a situation you’ve heard a thousand times before. Perhaps an objection caught you completely off guard and your only response was to offer to get back to the prospect at a later date. It could even be that the prospect wasn’t truly a prospect after all.

Whatever the cause of the lost prospect, dwelling on the situation serves no one. Take the opportunity to review what you can do better the next time to prevent a repeat occurrence. Add the lesson learned as one more feather of experience in your cap. Use the time gained from no longer pursuing this particular prospect to identify and approach another one. Whatever you do, shake it off and move on to the next opportunity. Stuff happens.

7. Celebrate the good shots – In a typical round of golf, I can manage one to three shots worthy of notice by my companions. One is usually a tee shot, another may be a strong fairway shot and, if I’m really doing well, a third may be a chip near the cup or a long putt that drops into the cup. In each case, I’m easily able to enjoy the moment, even occasionally doing a somewhat subdued version of a celebratory dance in the football end zone.

I strongly believe in celebrating the wins in sales. You can do this by setting a reward schedule based on the level of accomplishment you are expecting. Make your reward or celebration commensurate with the nature of the achievement and follow through. (This is one area of selling where strong follow through makes a huge difference in reinforcing the effective behavior and duplicating the positive result.)

The other great value in celebrating your own wins is that you create a self-reinforcement system that relies on no one else to deliver. I’ve seen situations in which a sales manager is so oblivious to the milestones reached by his/her team that positive reinforcement is practically nonexistent. I’ve also witnessed sales representatives so needy of attention for every little thing they accomplished that their managers accurately considered them "high maintenance" people. By putting your own reward system in place and following through, you have to rely on no one but yourself to enjoy the end zone dance. That way, you can regard any additional reward or recognition as a true bonus to what you’ve already given yourself.

How can you celebrate? Choose any number of ways. I tend to enjoy a dinner with my wife or wife and daughters so we can celebrate together. You can buy something new or take a vacation day and do whatever you please. Whatever you choose, be sure that it’s a positive experience and one that matches the level of the accomplishment.

8. You drive for show and you putt for dough – While low scores in golf rely on hitting good shots at every opportunity, the real scoring occurs on the putting green. Therefore, while a tee shot can be considered a thing of beauty in a straight and long flight down the fairway, the bottom line is how well you play on and around the green and how many times you putt the ball before it drops in the cup. In golf, you can be great off the tee, strong on the fairway and tremendous out of the bunkers; if you are unskilled or inferior when it’s time to putt, your score will be mediocre at best. One sad golfer’s tale is told on his automobile’s vanity license plate: I 3 PUTT.

In sales, every step of the sales process is important for your opportunity to improve your score. However, you putt for dough in selling by asking for action, a decision on the part of your prospect or customer. Some call this skill closing the sale. I prefer to call it opening, because it opens possibilities for the sale at hand, for future sales and for a long-term relationship between you and your buyer.

In sales as in golf, you can do everything else well, from prospecting to initial meetings to proposals, presentations and answering objections effectively. Unless and until you’re skilled at asking for the sale, your results will be less than stellar.

The statistics tell us that 50 percent of all sales opportunities go without the sales professional asking for the business. That’s akin to playing from the tee to the green in golf and picking up the ball before playing it to completion. Why does this happen? The primary reason is the fear of rejection, of having the prospect turn down your offer to buy. This is one of the most often discussed issues in all of selling. It cuts to the heart of why many people prefer occupations other than selling, because they so dislike the possibility of rejection that they choose not to subject themselves to such situations.

Statistics also tell us that across all selling, it’s likely that sales offers will be turned down four times out of every five. That’s an 80 percent rejection rate. This is also why those whose selling requires more rejection generally earn higher compensation for their sales than those who face little or no rejection.

To make sure that you’re scoring when it counts in selling, make sure you continually refine all of your selling skills. It remains true that doing things well early in the sales process puts you in a position where asking for action is more likely to get you the response you desire. Second, learn different ways to ask. There are scores of books and tapes on literally hundreds of effective techniques. Finally, remember that no one gets them all. In fact, use the SW³ formula: Some will, some won’t, so what!

9. Keep score – Keeping score in golf is the measurement of how well you play the game. By scoring as you go, you can check progress from one hole to the next and one round to the next. By knowing how you’ve played in the past and how you’re playing now, you can see whether you’re improving and by how much.

A hallmark of top sales professionals is that they know exactly where they stand in relation to their sales goals. While many companies provide reports that tell the numbers, the top performers are those who don’t wait for the reports. They know at any given moment how much they need to hit their targets for the day, the week, the month, the quarter and the year. By knowing the score, you can remain focused on your goals and give yourself better odds that you’ll accomplish them. Remember, it’s difficult to hit a target you can’t see, and if you’re not keeping score, the target is out of sight.

10. Enjoy the scenery – Many golf courses are noted for their natural beauty. Take a moment here and there and look around you. You’ll likely find pleasant surroundings, given comfortable weather conditions. Perhaps you’ve heard golf referred to as "a nice walk spoiled," where the experience is compromised only by the frustration of playing the game.

In selling, you enjoy the scenery by appreciating the opportunity to serve, to improve someone’s condition, to create a relationship or business where none existed. You take a moment occasionally to find things to be thankful for relative to your profession, the product or service you sell and/or your favorite customers. This is called the "attitude of gratitude" and is an effective practice in selling and in life. As Brian Tracy says, the more you give thanks for, the more you have to give thanks for."

Keep these lessons from golf in mind as you compete in the game of selling. For all the frustrations and challenges, both can be very enjoyable and rewarding. And, if your golf game is anything like mine, I strongly recommend that you keep your "day job."

John Carroll is President/CEO of Unlimited Performance, a Mt. Pleasant, SC, firm focused on organizational and individual performance improvement. He is the author of Sales Illustrated 68 Sales Lessons from Everyday Life. Contact him at 1-877-755-8844 toll-free, email at jcarroll@uperform.com, or fax at (843) 881-6746.