Good Morning!
As I have alluded to over the past few months, I’ve been taking guitar lessons with my daughter, Emma, via zoom. Very quickly, I realized the direct correlation between that experience and the coaching that I do with my sales reps and selling owners. Last week, this week and next, I’d like to share some key lessons.
Learning to sell print for the first time or adding a new selling skill such as inkjet can be overwhelming for a sales rep. It is easy to quit, give up, and miss out on a huge opportunity.
Imagine going food shopping with someone. You are walking behind them as they casually pluck things off-the-shelf and hand them to you to carry. But the thing is, you have no cart and no basket. Tomatoes, bananas, Oreos… You start to fill up. Bread, yogurt, oat milk, butter, eggs,… Until you finally yell, “Stop!”
That’s what these weekly guitar lessons felt like to me. There were countless techniques and skills to learn. Pentatonic scales, alternate picking, movable chords, sharps, flats, naturals. AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!! I was as overwhelmed as the guy holding all the groceries.
I yelled, “Stop!”
When the zoom call started, Jeff was ready to take me into some strumming exercise but I stopped him. I wanted to organize everything he had taught us (I take these lessons along with my daughter, Emma) in order to better understand and, more importantly, so that I could practice better.
Again, practice was the key. Do it the right way, and improvement is incremental. Do it as I had been doing it—jumping from one past lesson to another—not only was I going nowhere, I was getting frustrated.
What we did instead of playing was to come up with a 2-step plan for practicing:
- First, we organized the various lessons, and came up with the top four that would have the greatest impact on my improvement. Jeff told me, “Practice each of these lessons for 15 minutes, every day.”
- Second, we talked about each of the 4 homework segments and discussed how to create a perfect practice regimen.
And so I did, and OMG did it ever make a difference!
If you make a list of the skills that need work and then come up with a plan for perfect practice, it will add quality to your efforts and improvement will come faster. Next week, I will expand on this thought by going in a completely different direction. Stay tuned…
Next week: Planting 12 Trees One At A Time
