Sales people are hypnotized by the large sale. The idea of the big pay day, the out of the park home run. It is the stuff of legend, the sales rep that made his or her entire quota in one deal, the multi-thousand dollar commission check, etc. The "major deal" is so intoxicating that most reps spend their entire year nursing at least 1 or 2 on the slim hope that it will solve all their problems.  Basically salespeople like to hit for the wall (or for the cricket fans out  there the boundary).

The title of this article is Karma and Babe Ruth. The reason I picked Babe Ruth to illustrate this analogy is because his statistics are staggering. The Babe was famous for always aiming for the fences, and often claimed that it was his goal to hit a home run at every at bat. The result of this strategy was that he was one of the most successful home run hitters of all time but also over his career he struck out an awful lot. How much? The Babe, over his 22 season career scored 714 home runs a mind bending number. Yet he also struck out 1330 times in the same period. So he struck out 1.6 times as many times as he scored a homer.  And this is one of the BEST players of all time.

The lesson in my mind is don't aim for the fence.  For the rest of us our mortgages and car payments are made by hitting singles and doubles regularly day in and out. It is here that the karmic sales person shines. The karmic sales process builds a process for ensuring you are always on base to score and requires a discipline where you aim for smaller more repeatable sales, always being ready for the gift pitch which you can blow out. The key being not giving up the singles and doubles (smaller sales) in the hopes of the big one. So what are some of the key sales management techniques that will target you to these deals:

1. Consciously limit the time you spend working on big deals to a finite amount per week/day/etc based on your industry. Remember big is all relative. Figure out what the average sales price is for your product and focus your activities on opportunities that are within one standard deviation (+ or -) from that norm.

2. Figure out how to carve up big deals into multiple smaller deals. This is a lower risk way of still locking up the business and commissions without all or nothing swings.

3. Be ruthless about culling opportunities that are sitting around for greater than 2 times your mean time to close for normal deals.  Your likelihood of closing that deal reduces exponentially with the multiples on MTTC. Fill up the empty space in your pipeline with deals from 1.

Karmic selling is all about foreseeable consequence. If you are working deals using the points above you are for sure going to close more deals than swinging at the occasional pitch that might take you over the wall. A final point is that if you look at the all time great players as far as batting average (ie. hits to at bats) you will probably not recognize most of their names. Guys like Richard Hornsby and Pete Browning are not household names but were masters of the game. Where does Babe Ruth rank as one of the greatest home run hitters of all time? He is number 10.

Moment of Zen
"Are great things ever done smoothly? Time, patience, and indomitable will must show."- Swami Vivekananda

P.S. If you are interested in leveraging the karmic philosophy to accelerate your career or business please check out my website http://www.karmiccoach.com , and get Karma working for you!