Pat Summitt and Setting Goals

Today the sports world celebrates the life and legacy of Pat Summitt. The winningest basketball coach in NCAA Division I history, for both men and women, Pat lead her team to eight national championships with her signature Other-Centered^® leadership style. Though the world lost a transcendent leader today, her legacy remains. Let's take a look back at Pat's incredible career. 

The ASLAN Other-Centered^® Leader 
Coaches Quiz Blog Series

Every winner has a coach, and every coach has a philosophy.  The ASLAN Other-Centered^® Leader Coaches Quiz matches your coaching style with some of the legendary coaches in sports.  Here is a deeper look inside the philosophy of one of the best.

In almost four decades as head coach of the women’s basketball team at the University of Tennessee, Pat Summit won 1,098 games, making her the winningest basketball coach in NCAA Division I history (women or men). Perhaps even more notably, her teams went to the Women’s Final Four 18 times and won eight NCAA titles, and she led her 1997-98 team to a 39-0 record, culminating in the Lady Volunteers’ sixth NCAA championship.

Yet despite the fact that she has always acknowledged the importance of setting goals for her team, she never once set a goal of winning an NCAA title. “Setting goals is incredibly important to success,” she once said, “but if you set a goal that seems impossible to achieve—if you go into a year saying your goal is to win the national championship—then you risk losing morale, self-discipline and chemistry if you falter early.”

“Set a goal that stretches you, requires exceptional effort, but one you can reach,” she continues. “We might [have] set a goal that we win 20 or so games, that we win a conference championship, that we make the NCAA tournament. If we do those things, the truth is that we have a chance of winning the national championship.”

A telesales manager can learn a lot from this approach. The ultimate goal for any rep may be closing a sale, but he or she is unlikely to achieve that goal without taking important incremental steps along the way. Selling over the phone requires the ability to establish trust, credibility, and rapport (TCR) with a potential buyer, something one can do only after finding and reaching the appropriate strategic decision maker, which can be a protracted process in itself.

In our ebook “The 7 Barriers to Successful Prospecting (and How You Can Overcome Them)” we’ve highlighted the unique challenges inherent in selling to customers (especially over the phone) and identified the seven common barriers that well-meaning sales reps struggle to overcome.

Arguably the trickiest stage of the process is engaging the decision maker, as it calls for an approach that is counter-intuitive to what most reps naturally want to do or have been taught. In most cases, the best advice you can give your reps is: Don’t Sell. Don’t try to persuade the potential customer that your product or service is right for them.

Instead, communicate that you are not sure if what you offer is a fit, ask permission, compliment their current supplier, and speak in a relaxed, non-threatening tone. Also, ask for an opportunity to learn more about their objectives so they can decide if it makes sense to move on to the next step. Let them know that you have an understanding of what is important to them, which demonstrates that you have an Other-Centered® objective, as opposed to a self-centered objective. After all, your best chance for influencing a potential customer’s decision is to understand their needs, so you can position your solution in a relevant way.

Set achievable goals to reach and communicate honestly with the decision maker and if you do those things, the chance of closing the sale becomes a possibility.

For more on this topic download The 7 Barriers to Successful Prospecting (and How You Can Overcome Them), or contact ASLAN with any thoughts or questions.

If you'd like to read more about each of the coaches in our Other-Centered Leaders Coaches Quiz Series, click here. Or, if you haven't already done so, take our quiz and see which coach your leadership style is most like.

Editor's note: This blog post originally ran in October 2015.