FOUR!! Lessons My First Game of Golf In Years Taught Me and What It Can Teach You, Too
Ahhhh…. Golf!
“It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. It took one afternoon on the golf course.”
These are the four golf lessons for sales that stuck with me long after the round ended. I totally resonated with the last few words famously quoted by former Baseball Hall of Famer, Hank Aaron.
Not having picked up my golf clubs for quite a few years, I wanted those statistics to change.
And the decision to shift my thinking happened when packing up to move to the USA. With a limited baggage allowance and space at a premium I made a deliberate commitment to replace a pair of designer heels for my hardly-worn, FootJoys.
It was time to get back on the horse… at least the golf course!
So imagine my delight when my sister-in-law and avid golfer, Lindy Waldman, joined me from San Diego for a game at my local golf course [Raccoon Creek Golf Club], where I was able to put my money where my mouth was and don those shoes and my skort and take to the fairway once again…
Having had zero practice prior…. plus having Mo, an experienced golfer and retired CEO, join us … was a little nerve-wracking to say the least, but I swallowed my pride and ponied up for my first shot in 20 years!
Missed!
And missed again!
‘Dammit!’ I muttered, ‘Not again!’
Then…whack! The sound of my driver hitting that ball was seriously like music to my ears… albeit 50 feet of music!
And that’s when these four golf lessons for sales really began!
⛳ Golf Lessons for Sales #1: Accept the Misses and Look for the Learnings
At each miss, my higher self stepped in to ‘have a chat’ to my victim self. ‘Bernadette‘, I said, ‘you are playing the par, you are not playing Mo or Lindy.
And they don’t care what your swing is like or how many shots you take or how awkward you feel you look, because they, too, are playing the par. Their own par!’ The learnings are found inside our own thinking when we choose to get honest with ourselves and elevate that thinking to be more philosophical than emotional.
In our role as salespeople, we might appear to be on that metaphorical fairway with our team mates, yet we are really all just playing the par – we are playing against ourselves and making sure to get that deal home in as few shots as possible.
⛳ Golf Lessons for Sales #2: Decide Your Direction and Keep Your Eye on the Ball
Mo was amazing, he noticed that I had a really good stance but I was watching where the ball was going instead of keeping my body still, my eye on the ball and letting my swing do the work.
And it made me reflect on how often we fixate on the end result so much that our judgement on the day-to-day activities is clouded and prevents us actually getting to the end result.
Where we stress about what we AREN’T doing, where we get distracted and beat ourselves up for what we SHOULD be doing and where we stop focussing on the ONE THING that will create the game-changing momentum. Keeping our eye on the ball is the long game – it’s the day-to-day commitment to focus on the little things that will bring the bigger results home.
⛳ Golf Lessons for Sales #3: Your Body and Mind Are Intertwined
Talk about zigging and zagging. I mean… why on one hole does your body tense up and on another you play as smooth as liquid gold. Why on one shot are you high-fiving with a confident, ‘Yes, I’ve got this‘ and on the next you’re wondering what loser just inhabited your body? We tense up for any number of reasons when it’s our turn – to do anything!
And I don’t mean just playing golf! But performance-wise.
It could be…
- A lack of hydration to loosen up the connective tissue around our muscles and organs to help keep our body out of fight and flight mode
- Too many micro-thoughts creeping into our nervous system without us realising from prior stresses that haven’t been addressed,
- Not enough sleep, not enough socialising, over-thinking and pressure to be perfect or
- A lack of faith in our ability to lighten up and trust ourselves.
⛳ Golf Lessons for Sales #4: Find Your 19th Hole
Finishing my first game in years was a goal accomplished and deserved a celebration and yes, in my case, it was a lovely Pinot Grigio overlooking a gorgeous lake. It was not only me spending time with someone close to me, it was also me getting back on the horse.
How often do we fall off the horse in our role as sales leaders or salespeople and are too proud to get back up or take too long to do so?
- Whether it be prospecting activity where procrastination rules.
- Whether it be defaulting to the same conversations without stretching our curiosity.
- Whether it be falling back into the same victim mindset when things don’t go to plan.
And as usual,
Stay Bold, Brave and Brilliant!
EVENT ORGANIZERS (Video below) – As a speaker, my programs help CEOs of future-focussed sales organizations, who are concerned as to how to help their sales teams stand out more in a heavily competitive environment, gain the lead by securing more profitable and purposeful sales.
These golf lessons for sales are not really about golf. They are about what happens in the twenty minutes before and after the shot – the self-talk, the focus, the recovery – and that is exactly what separates good salespeople from great ones too.
If you want your team thinking about golf lessons for sales – and the mindset work behind every deal, not just the mechanics of it – Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations dig into exactly this territory.
Why Golf Lessons for Sales Stick Better Than Sales Training
There is a reason golf lessons for sales tend to land harder than another slide deck on the same objection-handling framework. On a golf course, you cannot fake a swing – you either hit the ball or you do not, and the feedback is instant, physical, undeniable. Sales conversations rarely give us that clean a signal, which is exactly why we need metaphors like golf to slow the moment down and actually look at our own thinking.
The best golf lessons for sales are not really lessons about technique at all. Mo did not fix my grip – he pointed out where my attention was, and that turned out to be the whole game. The same is true in a sales conversation: the fix is rarely the script, it is where your attention is while you are running it.
So the next time a deal slips or a call goes sideways, it might be worth asking which golf lesson for sales applies – are you watching where the ball went instead of trusting your swing, or are you still playing someone else’s par instead of your own?
Four rounds later, these golf lessons for sales still hold up – which is usually the test of whether an insight was real or just a good story you told yourself on a nice afternoon.
Turning Golf Lessons for Sales Into a Weekly Habit
None of these golf lessons for sales matter much as a one-off read. The value shows up when you turn them into a weekly check-in – five minutes at the end of the week asking which of the four you actually practised, and which one you talked about but avoided.
Try picking one golf lessons for sales principle to focus on each week rather than all four at once. Accept the misses this week. Keep your eye on the ball next week. Give your body and mind permission to work together the week after. Rotate through them until they stop being lessons you read and start being habits you run on, the same way a golfer eventually stops thinking about their grip.
That is really the point of borrowing golf lessons for sales in the first place – not to turn every sales meeting into a golf analogy, but to find a simple enough frame that the mindset actually sticks past the first Monday.
If nothing else, let this be the golf lessons for sales takeaway you actually keep: the round does not need to be perfect for the lessons to count, and neither does the quarter.
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
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And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
