If you’re like most people, you’ve never heard of the 20x rule, but you have heard of the 10x rule. The 20x rule is something that you should consider and implement from this moment on. In any business setting (and life in general), you must sow 20 times the seeds that you think are necessary or realistic to make anything happen.

Therefore, you have to put in 20 times the effort that you normally would put into your sales activities and your personal growth goals. The 20x rule in sales is applied to business and life.

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What would happen if you reached out to 100 prospects each day instead of five? What would happen if you cold-called 40 prospective clients each week instead of two? What happened if you learned the features and benefits of 60 products a year instead of just three?

Top sales professionals study, practice, & master there cold calling so that each of the 100 prospects you are reaching out to is listening to a professional that has a solution to their problem.

Regardless of what you sell, you need to know the products well. You also need to reach out to new people and network 20x more because they aren’t likely to fall in your lap on the first 2 calls. Some might, but most of them are going to require that you call them multiple times. Reaching as many prospective customers as you can is the key to steady growth for any business. If you have already reached out before you have established trust and rapport. Trust and rapport makes it easier to build a meaningful relationship with your prospects.

Anyone can use the 20x rule in sales. All they have to do is put in more than they think they need. For example, if you plan to print five new brochures and hand them out to people passing by the office, you should instead print 100 brochures and hand them out.

In sales, this is a powerful tool. If the customer is engaged in the conversation, you have their attention, and their interest. Of course, this is only achieved by building trust and rapport through consistent and professional touch points throughout the buying cyce.

On sales calls, it can be tempting to keep adding to options, ideas, possibilities, and considerations. However, when you are on the phone, there is no way that you can see the expression on the customers face, there is a good chance of losing them in the what-ifs or even talking them out of a sale by presenting too many alternative options.

Keep it simple and stick to your plan. So reach out to them 20x more than you normally would and keep it simple. When they are ready, they will open up and you can take advantage of your hard work by providing the solution they are looking for.

If another challenge or issue comes up in the conversation, make a note of it and ask the customer if this is something, they would like to discuss the next call. This is a great way to set up a follow-up call, which is now much easier to prep for as you have a topic and an understanding of the customer and her or his goals, objectives, and problems that your product or service can solve.

Try this. Go on Google (or any search engine, for that matter) and type in these words: Executive – Sales – Training – Coaching – Leadership – Programs.

You can try them in any order. You can even leave out one or two of the words if they don’t align with what your company is looking for. Know what you’ll find?

Very little.

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The skills needed to be an effective salesperson or manager are simply not the same as those required to be a successful sales executive and leader. By not providing access to executive sales coaching programs, executive sales coaching training and executive sales leadership coaching programs, companies are limiting their employees’ chances of being successful and hurting themselves in the process.

Sales managers are more inwardly focused as they oversee the day-to-day management of a company’s sales staff whereas sales executives are outwardly focused as they are responsible for a company’s overall sales strategy and developing client relationships.

Many employers blend these two roles into one position for a number of reasons with the most common being budget constraints. This can be a risky move however, as the two jobs require very different skill sets and it is not easy to find one person with an equal aptitude for both.

Sales managers are usually easy to identify because they have successfully climbed through the ranks of your sales team and they are intimately familiar with how things work from the inside out. However, if you then give that person the added responsibility of thinking proactively to grow your organization from the outside in, things can get a little dicey if that person is not a natural fit for the role.

Finding them the right executive sales coaching programs and executive sales coaching & training to develop and enhance new skills will be critical to their success. Sales executives can take the courses to refamiliarize themselves and practice continued training themselves as they lead your organization forward to growth and success.

Leading companies with high performing sales teams invariably provide training to their rookie sales executives to arm them with the skills they will need to overcome the new challenges they will face. They also provide access to ongoing executive sales coaching programs and executive sales coaching and training to their existing sales executives, so they can continue to improve and provide increasingly greater value to the company.

The skills needed to be a successful salesperson or manager are not the same as those required to be an effective sales executive and leader. By failing to provide access to executive sales leadership coaching programs that develop the skills they need, companies missing out by limiting their employees’ chances to be successful sales executives and take advantage of all of the available opportunities they are presented with.

Rest assured, finding your sales executives the right coaching, training and leadership programs will pay big dividends for your company. We have a great place for you to start.

The Sales Coaching Institute offers professional executive sales leadership training programs. Your leaders will walk away with a renewed sense of what it means to be an executive sales leader. Each training session will build off of the others and reinforcement training will ensure your executives are training to compete with the best of the best.

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Technology Is King

Many sales teams are heading for extinction because they can’t get the hang of new technology. Technology is ever-changing, and companies are adapting to this technology quickly, so you need to focus on ways to use this technology to reach your customers during unique points in their buying cycle. Selling on social media is a powerful opportunity if you take the time to lean in and really learn how to utilize it effectively. Many people are still focused on the dreaded cold-call instead of learning how to use the Internet to their advantage.

Social media is just one avenue you can use to reach your customers in a new place. You can also use emails, text messages, video conferencing, and screen sharing applications to reach your customers in new places and in new ways. Try sending your customer an email with a video of yourself that includes a short audio message with an attached customized PowerPoint. This personalizes the email and shows your client/prospect that you are putting in a great effort in order to help them solve their problem.

By focusing on the customer and reaching them via new technology channels you are going to stand out from your competitors. Remember that you must serve your prospect as if they were your number one customer. This will set you apart and pay dividends in the form of closed deals and new opportunities. When your customer notices this type of dedicated effort going into building your relationship and solving their problems, they will want to do more business with you and better yet, they will tell their friends about you. Learn to love the customer and the customer will love you.

Abraham Lincoln is one of the greatest leaders of all time. What made him so extraordinary? Does research back up those claims? Honest Abe lived a long and difficult life, but he never gave up and his persistence is what allowed him to make such a positive impact on the world.

If you’d like to be more like Abe, you may want to learn leadership from Lincoln’s leadership style. There is a lot a sales manager and/or a sales coach can learn from his leadership style.

Circulate Amongst the Troops

Research has shown that Lincoln tended to be outside the White House more often than inside during his presidency. Most historians believe that Abe met every Union soldier that enlisted in the Civil War. That’s saying something!

The lesson you receive is that you need to be an accessible leader if you’re going to get people to do what you want. Lincoln knew (and now you do, too!) that people are the best source of information. Accessibility is the first step towards building trusting relationships that allow communication to flow freely. If your team members know that they can talk to you about anything, they’re going to start doing it. Over time, that trust and rapport can get you the information you need to determine weaknesses, strengths, and other helpful data that will allow your team to prosper and help get your team through tough times successfully.

Keep the Door Open

Research has shown that Lincoln offered an open-door policy and was one of the most accessible executives the US ever knew. Personal secretaries at the time claimed that Abe spent almost three-quarters of his time meeting people. Regardless of how busy he was, he always found time to meet with those who called.

Modern business theories also back that up. It’s called ‘managing while wandering around’. Most modern CEOs (at least the successful ones) also spend most of their time gathering information in order to help them make the best decisions based on information they have collected themselves. They do that by making time for everyone, including lower-level employee’s that make things happen on a day to day basis.

As a sales coach and manager, you are responsible for your team’s success. You are the navigator of tough times and circumstances. It is your responsibility to navigate your team through tough waters.