Every day, on sales calls all over the United States, salespeople everywhere are waging war with themselves. They want to do better, make more calls, improve their closing ratios, but for many professionals, something always seems to thwart their best-laid plans. Sometimes it’s just a matter of bad timing or competitive forces that are beyond their control. But, according to consultant Pete Greider and clinical psychologist Dr. Steven Levinson in their book Following Through: A Revolutionary New Model for Finishing Whatever You Start (Kensington Books, 1998), the problem is inside the salesperson.Here’s how Greider and Levinson explain how salespeople shoot themselves in the foot by failing to follow through with their positive plans for improvement.
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rEveryone has a weak but smart force Greider and Levinson call The Wise One that urges you to do what’s best for yourself and your sales. Everyone also has another side, say the authors, a stupid but very strong force known as Thor that tempts you with more appealing options, such as leaving work at the stroke of five o’ clock to catch your favorite sitcom instead of making the extra cold calls you said you would, or staying in bed for an extra hour of sleep instead of keeping your vow to get an early start on the selling day. To win the war, you must control Thor, or at least get him out of the way, according to Greider and Levinson. Instead of relying on self-discipline or willpower, Greider explains exactly how you can follow through to get the job done. His three-step plan works by creating compelling reasons, leading the horse to water, and striking while the iron is hot.
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rWeak Will
rAs a psychologist in a cardiac rehabilitation unit, Dr. Levinson noted that some recovering heart attack patients followed diet and exercise orders initially, then abandoned their lifestyle changes after a few weeks, failing to follow through even when their lives depended on it, while other patients maintained their discipline. In looking for rational reasons for this seemingly irrational behavior, Greider noted that, even when patients desperately wanted to follow through, willpower may have waned when they needed it most.
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r"How many salespeople are out there who really, really want to increase their income and performance, for all kinds of reasons, but year after year they don’t follow through?" he asks. "We’re saying that the reason is that they’re looking in the wrong place for the solution. The wrong place, essentially, is willpower and self-discipline. They don’t work." Sure, you might enjoy the occasional triumph of will, but as a follow-through tool it’s unreliable, and consistent success demands consistent follow-through.
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rInner Child
rFew people always feel like doing the right thing, and there’s a good reason. As Greider explains it, we all have a split personality. Our every move is guided by two inner systems, one primitive, one state-of-the-art. The two systems do not speak the same language or communicate with one another, and while the state-of-the-art system guides us to do the logical thing for long-term benefit, the primitive one leads us into temptation by pressuring us to do what we most want to do right now.
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r"The best metaphor for this is a car with two steering wheels and two drivers," he says. "On the left you have a 98-pound weakling who is smart, called The Wise One. The Wise One figures out what to do for long-term benefit and steers the car in that direction. But there’s another driver on the right, very strong but not very smart. We call that driver Thor. And Thor has no destination at all. He’s like a three-year-old child, totally into the moment, totally into his physical needs, his five senses, and very persistent and powerful when he wants something. When The Wise One says, ‘Improve your closing skills,’ or ‘Read your new sales literature,’ and Thor says, ‘I want to go to the movies,’ Thor wins even though he’s stupid, because he’s stronger."
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rPowerful Pair
rLest you think that Thor is evil and determined to foil your every attempt at success, Greider emphasizes that he really isn’t good or bad but simply self-absorbed. When you can’t overpower him, you can outsmart him. If you know how to use his power, the same Thor that keeps you from getting anything done one day can drive you to new heights of productivity the next.
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r"If you set things up right," says Greider, "Thor will help you be a peak performer. And that’s what’s so exciting about how these strategies work. When you do set your environment up the right way, you’ll find Thor yelling and pushing to get you to do what’s right, and you achieve incredible things."
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rTo hit on just the right solution, keep it simple and stupid. You may have to do some silly things to make Thor cooperate, but not following through on tasks that will make you successful is equally absurd.
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r"The solution is to take a simple action so that Thor and The Wise One are both steering in the same direction at the same time. So in other words, you feel like doing what you know is best. They become a team so you have the power of Thor and the brains of The Wise One working together."
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rSmart Strategies
rGreider offers several strategies to help you make Thor your follow-through friend. The first, creating compelling reasons, shows that using the "wrong" reasons to follow through works better than using the right ones. For example, motivating yourself to work late because you want a raise in three months is like talking to the wrong decision maker on a sales call. You’re trying to appeal to a force that has intelligence but no power. The Wise One wants the raise but Thor wants to go home now, and Thor is the one with the decision-making muscle. To create compelling reasons that will spur you to action, Greider advises considering less logical but more powerful motivators.
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r"The idea here is that there’s a big difference between the right reasons for doing something and the truly compelling reasons," he says. "Compelling reasons are immediate, certain, and personal, whereas the right reasons tend to be logical and long-term but have very little immediate impact."
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rGreider illustrates his point with the story of a salesperson who called him about a year ago after hearing him speak. For years, the salesperson failed to follow through on his resolution to get up at 5:15 in the morning to study technical material. The salesperson, who had two very young children, had great logical reasons for getting up to study, but he failed until he created a truly compelling reason for himself. He decided to set one alarm clock in his bedroom for 5:12 and another one in the kids’ room for 5:15. When the alarm went off in his room, he would have a compelling reason to get up immediately – to go to his children’s room and turn off the second alarm clock before it went off at 5:15 and woke them up. "Once he set up a compelling reason that made him feel like doing the right thing, he didn’t have to rely on willpower anymore," Greider says.
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rGreider recommends creating your own compelling reasons by reviewing "when you’ve been highly motivated in the past. Write down times in your life when you’ve been really into following through. Next to those instances, write down what was motivating you at the time. It will often be something kind of silly, but that’ll give you some clues." In other words, if last quarter you were really motivated to put in extra hours so you could outsell another salesperson on your team, you can use that knowledge to create a compelling reason to follow through now.
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rWhile creating compelling reasons helps you use the wrong reasons to do the right thing, "leading the horse to water" lowers your resistance to following through by reducing the amount of effort involved. To lead the horse to water, simply tell yourself that you don’t have to complete the task, you have only to get started on it.
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rEasy Does It
r"The idea with this one is that every intention has an easy part and a hard part," Greider says. "Normally we think of the hard part. Leading the horse to water says that all you have to do is the easy part, then you can stop. This gets Thor out of the way, and in fact, doing the easy part often helps you build up enough momentum to do the hard part, as well. You can use this for cleaning up your office, for example. Tell yourself, ‘I have to spend five minutes cleaning up my office, and if I want to stop then, I can.’ Thor won’t object to a five-minute job, because that’s easy, but very often, that five minutes will turn into twenty or thirty, and by the time you really want to stop, you’ve made a big dent in the job or finished it completely."
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rGreider’s third strategy gets you "to strike while the iron is hot" so you can take full advantage of the fleeting moments when you feel inspired to move mountains. An uplifting speech or an inspiring passage from a book can put you in a motivated mood, but Greider points out that moods inevitably swing, and you have to take action when you do feel like it to help you follow through when you don’t.
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r"When you’re inspired to set something in place, take action immediately so that when the inspiration fades, you still follow through. Strike while the iron is hot instead of think that your super-motivated mood will last, because it won’t. Thor is a three-year-old, and three-year-olds are jumping from one thing to another all day long."

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When the spirit is willing but the two-part mind rebels, alternatives to willpower can overcome even the most stubborn inner child. Since sales success depends on consistent follow through, taming Thor and getting him to work with instead of against The Wise One puts any salesperson in top scoring position.