How Sales Is Like A Football Game

In this episode of Inbound Sale Journey, Gray and Ryan continue their discussion of metaphors with an example.

Gray and Ryan use the metaphor of football (American) to describe a sales call. Here’s how they broke it down:

• Pre-game Speech: Your pre-game ritual right before the call during crunch time that gets you amped up and you’re motivated to do your best on the call.
• Kickoff: This is the start of the call and building rapport with the client. You’re trying to get a feel for how they are
• 1st Quarter: Since you don’t have a scouting report on your prospect, you’re using this time to get a feel for how your prospect responds and their personality type.
• Big Plays: During the game there are ebbs and flows, back and forth which is typical of any sales conversation and will give you an idea of the success of the conversation
• Field Goals: These are mini closes, these get some points on the board and give you an indication of how well the conversations with the prospect is going. You should have a good idea if it’s “yes” or “no”.
• Defensive Coverage: This is feeling out and responding to your prospect in a certain way. Sometimes a prospect will be laid back and simple to deal with, and you can overcome objections quickly or sometimes they can be very aggressive, and you need to find out the best way to handle their sales personality and use what you know to respond to it. You can often match it, but then there’s also the time you can sit back and see what they’re doing and wait for them to make a misstep that you can then intercept and take back to demonstrate the value of your service.

Hopefully, this analogy can help at least our American readers get a good example of a metaphor applied to sales calls.