Every motorcycle rider has a saying that is relevant to sales. “Keep the shiny side up and the oily side down.”
This means, know what you’re doing in any circumstance. No matter what crisis happens, keep your priorities in order, do what you’ve been trained to do.
The same is true in sales. In a crisis, the temptation is to invent some new, unusual solution, when in fact in any crisis situation this is precisely what you should NOT do.
The answer to any crisis, large or small is: do the usual. You don’t need to invent some new policy as ordinarily someone has been through this before. Do what has already been proven to work.
When something comes up that invites an unusual solution due to some real or imagined emergency – do the usual - and things tend to stabilize.
When confronted with some real or imagined danger, just doing ordinary things will tend to extrovert your attention and get things back into a normal mode again. This allows you to catch your breath and decide on an effective plan to handle the situation.
Just as people in stressful careers, military, air traffic control, pilots, performers, athletes and others have a set pattern of trained and practiced actions to perform in any crisis or emergency situation, you too can and should develop a useful action plan to use for crisis management. Then practice it until you can do it automatically under any conditions.
Being aware of what is happening around you is the first step. This also includes being sufficiently aware of how things are supposed to work under normal conditions so you can tell when something is wrong.
Second, remain calm so that you make a correct assessment of the situation and your available resources before taking action.
Finally, once you know what is going on and what options and resources are available to you, then just do the usual, and do or get done the actions what will lead to the achievement of what needs to be done.
Most often, just “doing the usual, will calm things down, stabilize people and the situation long enough to get things under control.
Your survival and success often depends only whether you know and apply the usual solution that has worked before, not in spending time and attention on figuring out something new.
daniel w. jacobs
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