How Closing For Sales Parallels a Pilot's Mindset

Hi. My name is Brian Kavicky, and I am a sales consultant and coach at Lushin. 

I grew up in Chicago. Our house was under the airline approach path going into Chicago airport. I would stop whatever I was doing to look up into the sky and watch the airliners come in one after another. I dreamed of being able to fly a plane, and I wanted to be a pilot.

I don't have any plans to fly for the airlines, but I love to be in the air, and I fly myself for both personal and business travel. When we want to be somewhere, we get frustrated when our plans don't work out. If you are driving somewhere and run out of gas, you walk to the next exit, get the car filled up, and get there later than you wanted. 

You aren't typically happy about it, but you arrived safely.

When you take responsibility for flying yourself or others, the paradigm shifts. If you run out of gas or if you put the wrong gas in the plane, the engine dies. You will likely find yourself gliding towards a bumpy landing in a farmer's field.

If you fly into a thunderstorm that you can't see or ice in the clouds, the airplane doesn't fly anymore. As pilots, we do everything we can to avoid situations that will kill us. In small planes, we can't fly in the same weather that an airliner can. We check everything before the flight. We plan the flight path.

We learn to be meteorologists to understand the weather. We check everything that could fail in the plane before we take off. Off. We use checklists to make sure that we don't miss anything important.

When something fails during the flight, we have backup equipment and procedures in place to get us safely on the ground. We are acting to stop failure. You don't stop failure by focusing on the destination.

Professional selling is really no different. Salespeople focus on winning the sale. Strong selling is about focusing on not losing the sale. Are you planning for your sales call? Are you qualifying the prospect to be the right fit? Are you preventing things from occurring that will negatively affect the outcome? Are you ready for situations that don't go as planned?

Do you have milestones and checklists in place to make sure you are doing the right things? Are you following the same process every time so that you know when something isn't right? As a pilot, I am constantly training to be more proficient. I have to take regular check rides to prove that my skills are ready to go when they need to be.

I don't treat selling any differently.