Write Today, Right Tomorrow

Salespeople and Bass fishermen are alike in many respects, especially when it comes to patience, or lack thereof. People don’t often associate impatience with fishing, but that’s only because they’ve never seen a fidgety bass pro cast a couple hundred times in an hour, or speed full throttle to a spot about 200 yards away. Salesmen are guilty of the same mentality. “I want something to happen now, otherwise I’m moving on.”

Therein lies our issue with “paperwork.” Why the heck would we want to waste our time doing paperwork when we could be out there catching fish or making sales? We simply aren’t wired with enough patience for paperwork.

Truth be told, the very best anglers and sales reps have a dirty little secret; documentation (a.k.a. paperwork).

Going back to a conversation I had with Jay McNamara he noted that “the best anglers keep logs, and the very best transfer those logs to a computer database.” It may not seem important on the face of it, but over time our memories fade, but “a written record doesn’t lie.”

As Dr. Jay describes on bassedge.com he is in the habit of documenting as much as he can about a day of fishing- his own catches, locations, weather, water temp, lure types and colors… he’ll even document what others will share with him. Like after one of his first tournaments when he heard he could find bass in a particular bay where there was hard stemmed cain reed and bull rushes with a mixture of vegetation. He scribbled that in his notebook… years later, because of those notes, he was able to find that particular spot AND the huge bass that were in it!

Jay suggests “keeping a notebook on hand and after a sales call writing down every single thing you can remember.”

In essence, all of this paperwork and documentation is like mapping. We’re capturing information today that will remind us where to go, and what to do, tomorrow… and the more detailed the information is, the more powerful it can be. Maybe we closed a challenging prospect... or maybe we had a prospect say "no" for a particular reason. Whatever the case may be, tomorrow is a new day and the more information we have about our prospects the better of we are.

In my own sales experience I have also learned that all of this documentation not only helps the prospecting and selling phase, but the implementation phase as well. The more notes I have on a new client, the smoother the transition goes... and the happier the client is. Hmmm....

It can definitely be a time consuming task, but the more we write today the better of our fishing and selling will be tomorrow. If bass pros can take the time, in between 3000 casts a day, to write down a few notes, I suppose I can take the time to make some notes on the few meetings I conducted.