Best laid plans can go right out the window any time another person is involved! This is as true in sales as it is in other areas of our life. Improv training provides some great sales tips for dealing with anything we hadn’t planned for — whether it’s an unexpected objection or an impromptu elevator pitch. Last week I introduced the First 3 Rules of Improv: Know Your Material; Fire the Editor and Be in the Moment.

The next 3 Rules have proven especially helpful in my sales presentations and client meetings. I hope you find them useful as well!

1. Commit to Your Choices
   Commitment? Yikes! As salespeople we reserve the right to change our opinion based on what the client thinks, right? Wrong! See your choices through; don’t be batted around by every wind. You may not win everyone over, but you’ll win something that is too often overlooked in sales: self respect. Read More…

“Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.”
– Paul Simon

Ever marveled at how skillfully Improv players respond to the seemingly unrelated suggestions thrown at them? There is no script to follow, no direction and typically only the thinnest of plots. Does this sound familiar to you? It should!

As salespeople, how often do we walk into a situation with a thread-bare plot (i.e., an information-gathering meeting), unsure of what’s going to confront us (objections, personality conflicts, budgets, etc.) and last but not least, an audience waiting to be entertained by our sales presentation. (Yes, your client expects some entertainment for their hard-won time and dollars!)

Sellers can learn some valuable sales tips from Improv players, like how to take a curveball and turn it into a homerun. But there is more to Improv than just spitting out the first thing that comes to mind. Here are the first of 7 Improv Tips for Sellers that can help keep us on our toes when the rules of the game are changing daily and reacting quickly and skillfully to the unexpected can mean the difference between winning and losing the sale.

The first 3 Rules of Improv for Sellers are:

1. Know Your Material.
   Sounds obvious, yes? But this critical step is often overlooked in our rush to get in front of a client. Before you can improvise something, you must know it inside and out, forwards and backwards. You must know WHAT you’re saying, and you must know WHY you’re saying it — and “My manager told me to” is not a good enough reason! Practice your sales script. Read it out loud to the dog. Rap it to your roommate. Know it so well that if you had to, you could pick it up at any point within the script, ad-lib it and run through it with ease.         Read More…