When I started in sales many years ago, I was greatly influenced by reading books by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone. I actually fell in love with sales as a profession. My other love was golf. I read so much about both of them I began to see some parallels.

In those days, Jack Nicklaus dominated the game of golf. Younger people today who never saw him play can't imagine how great he was. After all, he not only won 18 major championships, he finished second 19 times!!! That's 37 trips to the trophy or the runner-up chair (Match that, Tiger!) in majors... a sport where for most 3 majors or maybe 10 total wins in all tournaments is a career!

But, I digress. I remember reading an article by Jack Nicklaus in one of the golf magazines. He said he worked on his skills in practice.  But, on the course, he never thought about execution, only strategy.

That brought to mind Abraham Maslow's Four Stages of Learning:

1. Unconscious Incompetent - You don't know something and you don't even know what you don't know, let alone how to do it. So, you begin learning.
2. Conscious Incompetent - Now you at least know what you don't know and you begin working on it.
3. Conscious Competent - Now you know something and you can practice it, but you have to think about it. It's not 'grooved' yet.
4. Unconscious Competent - Your skills are so grooved, you no longer have to think about it. You're mind is now free to focus on something besides execution; you can now think about strategy.

These stages not only apply to golf; they apply to sales, as well!  The first stage is to find out what you need to learn. You then find that the more you learn, the more there is to learn, and you begin to practice. In the third stage, you're becoming proficient in your practicing, but you have to think about it. I can recognize this stage in many salespeople who will ask me questions like, 'What do you say when the prospect says.....?' They're still `tactic-bound' and that's what they think about. Once they learn it's not what you say, but what you ask... and they learn to groove that, that's when they move to stage #4.

In stage #4, the top pro is not thinking tactics, s/he is hearing `symptoms' and thinking strategically. The responses, i.e., whatthey then ask the prospect, has become a grooved response.

Example:

The prospect says: "That price seems a little high!"

• The amateur focuses on tactics: "Actually, on a cost-per-unit basis,we compare quite favorably with ......"
• The professional thinks strategically. The pro wants to 'translate' the objection and will use a series of questions until s/he understands the objection's true meaning:

• "Interesting. Are you saying that because you're not sure you'll get the return you want?"
• "Really? How far apart are we?"
• "I see, why do you say that?"

Keep practicing until you become an unconscious competent. Get in the 'batting cage' (short fun role-plays) with a few friends until you can groove strategic responses to all those comments you've heard a thousand times before.

It works!

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