by John Carroll

Ice hockey ranks high among the fastest team sports anywhere on the planet. Pucks travel over 100 miles per hour and skaters chase them with a blazing speed you simply won’t find in a contest without machines or animals directly involved.

After being a casual hockey fan for years, I’m now the father of an amateur hockey player (and an assistant coach for my daughter’s local peewee team). As a result, I’ve learned more about the basics of hockey in the last 6 months than I did in 20 years of following the sport. Upon reflection, some of hockey’s basic concepts apply well to professional selling. Here are some examples:

1. Keep your stick on the ice. For a hockey player to be most effective, the blade of the hockey stick needs to be on the ice surface to receive, handle, pass and shoot the puck. Players must learn to skate forward and backward, turn, stop and start, all the while with that blade on the ice in case the puck comes in their direction. In essence, it helps keep them in the game.

Keeping your stick on the ice in selling is putting yourself in position for the sale, the advance, the great referral and repeat business. By doing so, you are expecting that it’s coming your way. That keeps you in the game. Just as a great hockey player is always looking for the pass, for the shot, for the check that stops an opponent’s rush, a top selling professional is constantly setting the stage and remaining ready for the next opportunity.

2. Keep your head up. Since hockey is such a fast game, players with their heads down miss dozens of chances to pass, shoot and score. They also put themselves at risk of injury because they’re unaware of opponents racing toward them as well as pucks zipping at them.

In selling, you had better be "heads up" at all times for any number of reasons. Circumstances change, your best accounts may be moving away from you and your compensation plan can undergo major revisions as the market dictates what it wants from your company. How can you respond to the changes as they happen if your attention is drawn from the big picture? Top sales professionals keep one eye on the horizon while they work on the task at hand. Holiday Inns had a great campaign years ago when their message was, "No Surprises." With your head up and in the game, you’ll have fewer surprises.

What does it take to be heads up in selling? Reading about the latest in sales technology, customer relationship management and trends among your key customer markets is one area. Listening to your customers, your sales manager, your peers and your acquaintances for trends, new opportunities and potential new threats is another. Knowing that your competition comes from rival companies, the Internet and your customer’s inclination toward the status quo certainly helps. If you’re going to play effective offense and defense in selling, you want to be constantly aware of all of these issues.

3. Be able to stop and start quickly. Hockey is a game where the direction of play changes continuously. Skaters who can stop on a dime and reverse their direction with little if any transition time frequently reach the puck first and can make a play that helps their team take the advantage.

The world is changing faster than ever. Selling reflects that rate of change. Those who can stop what they’re doing the moment it loses value and immediately begin something else of greater value are on top of their game. Those who continue with low-value activities because that’s the way it’s always been done or because they’re slow to react and respond to customer requests or market conditions often miss opportunities to get the sale or rescue the customer’s business. As Brian Tracy has said, "If you find yourself in a hole, often the best thing to do is stop digging."

4. Improve your skating ability. You can have the best slap shot in the world and not even make the team if you can’t master the skills involved in ice skating. If you can’t put yourself into positions where you can pass, score, stop the opponent and otherwise contribute to your team, you are low value to that team. Hockey players practice edge drills so that their skate blades are simply an extension of their feet. By doing so, they learn to move just as nimbly on skates as they can on solid ground in athletic shoes.

Your action orientation, your ability to maintain high levels of sales activity is just as important. You can have the greatest presentation style in the world, the best rapport-building skills and the finest skills of persuasion. They mean nothing if you don’t apply them through activities that put you in position time and again to use what you have. This may appear extremely basic and it is. Yet it’s the lack of such basics that kills sales careers, sometimes before they start, because some people fail to realize the value of sales activities. Nike’s advertising exhortation of "Just do it" may be overused. It applies here nonetheless.

5. Stay on side. One of the first rules you learn in hockey is the offside rule. This means the puck must enter the offensive zone ahead of the attacking players. When this is the case, play continues. When an attacking player enters before the puck crosses the blue line, however, play is stopped and any momentum on that play is lost.

Getting ahead of the customer causes a similar loss of momentum in the selling process. This comes from too much talk and too little listening on the part of the sales professional. The game of sales is about getting a series of small agreements along the way to commitment in which the prospect agrees to buy from you. Alan Weiss calls this "conceptual agreement," whereby you reach a common ground in understanding your prospect’s primary objectives, key measures and the value of accomplishing those objectives.

Selling is truly about helping your prospect help you understand. You simply cannot do that if you’re taking up all the airtime, listing feature after feature of your product or service. By doing so, you’ve left your prospect behind and forfeited any momentum you may have had earlier.

6. Take your shot. You can skate, handle and pass the puck and play great defense. To win a hockey game, you must outscore your opponent. If you don’t shoot, you won’t win. Wayne Gretzky, regularly referred to as the greatest hockey player ever, is quoted as saying, "I’ve missed one hundred percent of the shots I didn’t take."

To take your shot in selling, ask for the business. No matter how well you go through the other steps in the selling process, when you don’t ask for the order, you’ve opened the door for three things to happen, all of which are bad for you. First, you don’t reach your objective and your kids go hungry yet another day. Second, you’ve wasted the entire time you’ve invested in getting to the point where you should ask for the business. Third, since your prospect is also expecting you to ask, your failure to do so translates into a lack of confidence and belief on your part that what you’re selling is exactly what she/he needs.

7. Know where your teammates are. There are two hockey statistics that determine the leaders in scoring, goals and assists. The top offensive players in any league put up big numbers in both. Unless you’re planning to skate through five opposing players, then beat the goalie and put the puck in the net alone, you’d better know where and how to get help from your teammates.

No one goes it alone in selling. You may have a support team to fulfill the sale you’ve just made. You may have an inside person who takes product and service support calls while you’re out working on new business. Or you may have people to refer business to you. In any case, you have people you rely on to help you. Knowing who they are and taking great care of them is in your own best interest. Treat these people as you would your best customer or client. They are every bit as valuable to you.

8. Skate hard and take breaks often. One of the exciting aspects of hockey that separates its from most other sports is the substitution of players while the game is in progress. These line changes happen frequently, allowing players to work very hard for relatively short periods of time and take a breather before they do it again. Players rest on the bench, not on the ice.

Working hard in selling means that you sell during selling time. Taking a break, getting a quick drink of water and getting back into the game is fine. Using large parts of your selling day to stop, think, rest and relax is simply a way of procrastinating on what you know you should be doing. Your prime time in selling is when your prospects are available to you. Use your prime time to be in contact with and in front of your customers and prospects. Do your paper work, your thank you notes and other support activities outside of prime time. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself resting while your competition is scoring with your accounts.

9. Stay out of the penalty box. Hockey’s penalty box is the equivalent of a child’s "time out." In hockey, this means you’ve broken a rule and you must now sit, while the game is in progress, for a period of at least two minutes. In many cases, your penalty has also put your entire team at a disadvantage, because it may be forced to play with one less player than the opposing team. A team with high penalty minutes in a game has to work much harder than it would otherwise to win.

When you don’t play by the rules in selling, you’ve created several self-imposed penalties. If you make false claims about your product or service, promise delivery dates you can’t keep or say anything negative about your competition, you’ll suffer the consequences of losing future business and credibility with your prospects, customers and support team. You also put your entire team at a disadvantage. Stay out of the penalty box in selling by using good judgment, always telling the truth with everyone you see and making it a habit to under-promise and over-deliver.

10. Be strong on the power play and penalty kill. Special teams in hockey are those in situations where one of the competing teams is playing with fewer than 5 skaters. Two important hockey statistics are the number of times your team scores on the power play (when you have more skaters on the ice than your opponent) and how often your opponent fails to score on the power play (your team’s penalty kill). Teams invest considerable time in practice to be effective in these situations.

In both hockey and selling, the action can be fast and furious. Use these principles to be on top of your game, get the big score when you need it and post a winning record in reaching your sales goals.

John Carroll is President/CEO of Unlimited Performance, a Mt. Pleasant, SC, firm focused on organizational and individual performance improvement. Brian Tracy International, a worldwide network of consultants, has recognized him for sales excellence. Contact him at 1-800-672-4277 toll-free, email at jcarroll@uperform.com, fax at (843) 881-6746 and find him on the Web at www.uperform.com.

© 2000 John Carroll All rights reserved.