A Baylor Strength Coach Taught Me Something About Sales

Years ago I was looking at the max lift numbers for the strength program at the Baylor School in Chattanooga (the high school, not the university in Waco, Tx). This school is now one of the top 25 high school football programs in the country, routinely visited by SEC coaches for the players they turn out. Their numbers were stunning. High school kids putting up weight you’d expect from college athletes. I asked the strength coach, one of my dearest friends and mentors, what he was doing. He told me it was no one thing. It was all the little things compounding over time.

I think about that line every time a sales team tells me they need more leads. Sometimes they do. But it’s rarely the primary constraint on growth. What they need is to stop losing the leads they already have.

The teams that grow the fastest run several small plays at the same time. Each one moves conversion by a point or two. None of them feel impressive. After a year, the team running them is in a category their competitors can’t reach.

Here are three of the small plays we’re testing in our own pipeline right now.

1) An ROI calculator for buyers who don’t think in ROI

Most of our deals run through HR. HR buyers rarely think about purchases in ROI terms. Finance does. Operations does. HR usually doesn’t.

So we built a 1 page ROI calculator and started sending it after the first real conversation. It does two things. It puts a number in a conversation where there wasn’t one before. And it gives the HR buyer a document they can carry into a CFO’s office and use.

Buyers who couldn’t articulate the cost of the problem to anyone else in their company suddenly could.

2) A Loom video after the first sales call

The standard play after a discovery call is an email recap. Here’s what we discussed, here are the next steps, talk soon.

We replaced ours with a Loom video. Two minutes. Here’s what you said you wanted. Here’s what you said you’re dealing with. Here’s how it’s affecting you. Then a few things to be thinking about as you go through this.

The buyer hears their own situation reflected back to them by the person they just met. One in a hundred competitors do this. Most never will.

3) A package sent up the chain when the rep is stuck too low

Reps get stuck at the wrong level all the time. They start with an HR manager or a director. The real decision lives two or three levels up. The rep can’t get there. The deal stalls.

When that happens, we put together what we call a shock and awe kit and send it directly to the senior leader the rep couldn’t reach. The kit includes praise and credit for the original contact, because we don’t want to burn that relationship. We’re not going around the manager. We’re going above them. There’s a difference.

Sometimes the senior leader opens it and the deal moves in a week what wasn’t moving in a quarter. Sometimes they don’t. The cost of trying is low. The cost of staying stuck at the wrong level is the deal.

What Teams Pay For Not Doing This

None of these tactics will move a single deal next week. What they do is change what your team becomes over a year.

The teams that don’t run these plays hit a ceiling on conversion and assume they need more leads. They spend money on marketing they didn’t need to spend. The pipeline keeps filling, and it keeps bleeding deals out the bottom.

The teams that do run these plays stop talking about needing more leads, because their close rate keeps climbing on the leads they already have.

The strength coach had the same kids every other school had. He just refused to believe there was one thing that would make them great.

Pull up the deals in your pipeline that have been stuck for sixty days or more. For each one, ask what the buyer needs from you that no one’s sent them yet. Build one of those things this week.

Run it for a year. See what your team becomes.

Adam