Page 45 - Never Fly Solo

18 | NEVER FLY SOLO
Sales support, IT, finance, your office assistant, and even
your spouse should participate in such sessions. And they do
not all have to be face-to-face. Conference calls or Web meet-
ings are great places to chair fly challenging scenarios at work,
such as what to do when there are layoffs, budget cuts, missed
sales projections, late shipments, bad weather, or even IT
challenges such as a computer outage or Internet failure.

Break Down the Task into Manageable Chunks

At the beginning of Chapter 6, “Break Right!” I describe how
I performed a complicated missile defense maneuver. If you
look at all the steps as a whole, it can be quite overwhelming.
But when chair flying, I would practice only one maneuver at
a time until I got it perfect, and then string together the addi-
tional maneuvers. I would add more and more steps until I
was able to perform the entire procedure by memory, with no
mistakes.
When chair flying a new process, checklists are a very
effective tool. They contain small, bite-size chunks of mission-
critical information, along with cautions and warnings. Pilots
strap them above their knee for quick and easy access in flight.
Keep your checklists accessible when practicing your business
missions. Consider all the steps involved in the sales process:
greeting a customer or prospect, building rapport, asking
questions about the prospect’s business, providing product/
service demonstrations, verbalizing next steps, setting up a
follow-up meeting, asking for the sale, and so on. It’s easy to
get overwhelmed after the third or fourth step, but when you
focus on mastering one step at a time, using a checklist to
remind you of key items, it whittles down the stress and anxi-
ety of trying to memorize the entire process.