TLDR: Five key takeaways are: 1. Eliminate activities that are unnecessary and don’t add value for the customer. 2. Minimize activities that are necessary but don’t add value for the customer. 3. Complete activities from beginning to end as quickly as possible. 4. When things don’t go as planned or expected, find out why, make a change and see if it fixes the problem. 5. Empower the people who are carrying out activities to continuously improve the process.
In the 80’s Toyota came out with a practice called Lean Manufacturing which led to tremendous success and has been emulated by many manufacturing companies around the globe. Taking that same mentality, Robert Pryor adjusted and tied it to selling, thus creating the 5 key takeaways of Lean Selling.
Takeaway #1:
Think of the space you sell in. How many competitors are there on the market? I can bet there are dozens of companies in your space trying to reach your prospect for their time to talk about xyz features and products. Now think about your prospect. What are they responsible for? Now think of all the companies that are attempting to get time with your prospect for all the things they are responsible for. A metric ton of emails, cold calls, and outreach coming their way. How do you rise above the noise? Value, value, value…
The goal of every meeting is to get to the next meeting. How do you do that? Give value every time. Make the meetings and the information relevant to your prospect, their industry, and their needs.
Takeaway #2:
Back to value. Toyota and Rob Pryor (Lean Selling) realize that making things difficult for the prospect/customer makes it harder for you to sell to them. Reduce the workload from their side to easily sail through their buying process. We all like giving prospects homework to get them further involved in your product/solution, however don’t make that homework difficult to the point of abandonment. The prospect needs to see the value and that your solution is worth the work.
My 9th grade English teacher always said K.I.S.S. Keep it Short & Sweet. Same thing applies with how much work you give your prospect, make it simple to buy your product/solution.
Takeaway #3:
Don’t halfa** things, and get it done right. Identify ways to improve so you can get those things done right, faster.
Takeaway #4:
They say intelligence is measured based on pattern recognition and that failure is the best teacher. Ray Dalio says that when we fail, we need to fail successfully. All that means is that failure is a part of life, learn from it and make necessary adjustments.
If your process is not working it’s probably not the prospect, it’s probably you…
Takeaway #5:
It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a “family” to build a company (shout out to my first manager that claimed we were all family then laid us off). We need our work family to help provide different perspectives on how we can improve upon our processes. That does not mean negative feedback solely, but could be good feedback.
When I sit on my reps calls, we debrief and strategize next moves afterwards as well as review feedback. We can always improve, even on things we do well and it’s important to recognize that.
