Paul M. Caffrey (00:01.87)
People you most admire, the best sales leaders and also the most successful A's have a secret.
So this morning, this morning I was doing my PT session and half seven in the morning and twice a week religiously always go. I do a group PT session because if it's on me, I will get to the gym, but I probably won't work out with the same level of intensity. I definitely won't do the exercises with the correct posture on my own versus having somebody there to tell me what to do to make sure that I'm doing the exercise right to know when I need to.
add more weight or increase the load, or maybe when I need to take her back a little bit. That's the whole idea of going and getting coaching in a PT setting. However, I was chatting to my coach today and this person is super fit, extremely knowledgeable in the industry for a very, very long time and is coaching people all day when it comes to PT. And they turn around and says, I'm wrecked today. I was like, well, why are you wrecked from?
I just started doing a new exercise class. I started doing CrossFit and I'm in bits. You started doing a training session with someone else. Like, yeah, I'm doing CrossFit and I'm going to this gym. It's really, really amazing. It's got these great coaches. It's got these great trainers and I'm shattered after it. And that's when it hit me and I thought it was very relevant to share this today. It's that even people who are successful, who are doing well,
and who from the outside appear to know what they're doing and to the most extent certainly do, still get coaching, get guidance from others so that they can perform on an even higher level so that they can maybe push themselves in different directions and so that they can really, really look to make improvements.
Paul M. Caffrey (01:59.118)
So if you think about this, most CEOs these days are getting coaching. It could be coaching on leadership, it could be coaching on how to build out your organization, it could be coaching on how to make the organization more self -sufficient so they don't need to be involved in so many decisions. But the same is said for a lot of sales leaders out there. You look at your sales leader and you think, well, they've got 20 years experience, they've closed all these deals, they know exactly what they're doing.
And to a certain extent they do. However, the landscape is always changing. And the reality is coaching holds you to account. Coaching opens your eyes to new and better and different ways of doing things. And it propels you to be able to be more successful faster than you would have been if you would just went and figure things out on your own. So if you're in the position of not receiving coaching,
and you're working in sales, it's the equivalent of being a footballer and maybe not getting any coaching there. It's hard to believe that we would have these elite professional footballers all get coaching, but every single one of them do. And they have coaches for their mindset. They have coaches for fitness. They have coaches for developing skills. They've got coaches to develop tactics. They've also got nutritionists teaching them how to eat. The top clubs even have sleep coaches to make sure that they can get the most rest at the right time and...
The list is endless. It goes on and on and on. And when you see top teams like Manchester City win a league, you will see the players go out and yeah, there's maybe 20, 30 players or maybe a few more of them. The coaching team is even bigger. And that just goes to show the level of investment that is put into top level sports people for them to be successful. For you as a salesperson, investing in yourself is absolutely critical and it can come in the form of one -on -one coaching.
Group coaching is super because you don't not only get to take on content and whoever's leading that group, you get to learn from them, but you also get to the network effect of getting to learn from other people who are on that course with you. Then you may look to books, a very low cost way to go get coached or even consuming podcasts like this or looking at other resources out there, be it free downloads or whatever it may be. The key thing is if you have the resource,
Paul M. Caffrey (04:18.638)
Take time out of the equation. There's never a good time to invest in yourself. There's always a reason to put it off. Don't do that anymore. Put yourself first and step into that future self that you want to become and go and get a coach. Think about where do you want to go? Have a think about what you're actually doing at the moment. What do you need to improve? So for example, I was just chatting to one of the leading LinkedIn sales navigator coaches out there, Perry Van Beek.
Paul M. Caffrey (04:49.326)
And he has shared that most people have Sales Navigator, but they don't know how to use it. If you went and got some coaching, if you got some advice, if you went and did some courses on it, you could very quickly become a top 1 % salesperson using Sales Navigator, which is ultimately going to help you not only find leads and find business, but as we spoke on the podcast, there are smart links and advanced features that not only save you time, but make it easier for you to know if someone is ready to invest or not.
So what I mean by that is you can share your presentation on Sales Navigator via Smart Links. You can then get notifications of people who have read the document, how much time they've spent on it, if they've watched the video that you've shared with them. And then you can know how interested or not they are in what you're offering, which can in turn help you with the negotiation. And on the podcast, Perry shares how he saw that somebody on their team were really, really interested in the quote they sent across. They said they wouldn't do it unless they got a ridiculous discount.
he could see that interest was there and the activity levels were high. So he was able to hold firm and what happens? They call him back and he gets the deal done. So look at the great leaders around you, think of the great people that you've worked with and be mindful that they, most of them have gotten coaching. If you're not getting coaching, that is something I advise you go and do. Cheers.
