Winter Is Coming, Sailors (Or Sellers)

It's the third Friday of August, I made it to the boat for another great weekend of enjoying the best part of this land.  

Time on Lake of the Woods, sailing and racing against my fellow sailors and slowly starting to realize....

I don't want to think of it, I want this to go on forever and yet I know. It is a gift to be able to ramp down a bit in the summer, let the goals be set according to the seasons.  

Yet, winter is coming.  

Behaviours x Attitude x Technique = Success.  

Let's break it down and build the plan for the final period of the year. 

Does how you feel impact what you do? Or does what you do impact what you feel?

The old debate.

My honest answer after years in this business: it runs both ways, but only one direction is trainable.

You can’t will yourself into a great attitude before a tough Monday of cold calls. But you can build behaviours disciplined enough that the attitude catches up to them. Sandler has always taught this backwards from how most people think about motivation. Don’t wait to feel ready. Build the routine and let the feeling follow.

So as I point the bow back toward the marina for the season, here’s how I’m breaking down Behaviour × Attitude × Technique for the final stretch of the year:

• Behaviour. This is the “did you actually do it” layer. Number of prospecting touches, number of discovery calls booked, time blocked for business development instead of just admin and delivery. Summer let this slide a little, by design. Fall means rebuilding the cadence: same time each day, same non-negotiable blocks, tracked whether I feel like it or not.
• Attitude. This is the internal weather system. Beliefs about rejection, about your own worth outside of a sale, about whether “no” today means “no” forever. Attitude erodes quietly and you don’t notice it until you catch yourself avoiding the phone. The fix isn’t a pep talk; it’s noticing the self-talk and rewriting the script before it runs the show.
• Technique. The actual skill: how you ask questions, how you handle objections, how you qualify instead of chase. This is the one people obsess over first, but it’s multiplied by the other two, brilliant technique with poor behaviour or a bruised attitude still adds up to zero.

Ideas for how you might frame your own year-end summary:

1. Before/after snapshot: Pick one metric per category (e.g., prospecting touches for Behaviour, a self-rated confidence score for Attitude, close rate or objection-handling wins for Technique) and show summer numbers vs. your target for Q4. Concrete beats vague.
2. “What I let go of, what I’m picking back up": A short, honest list. Readers relate to the seasonal permission to rest as much as the discipline to restart.
3. One story per category: A specific moment this summer (or last fall) where a Behaviour, Attitude, or Technique shift changed an outcome. Stories stick better than frameworks alone.
4. The multiplication, not addition, point: Reinforce that these three multiply each other rather than stack. A zero in any one collapses the whole equation. That’s a strong, quotable closing line.
5. A simple public commitment: End with 2-3 specific behaviours you’re committing to through year-end. For me, public accountability is very on-brand for a sailor who races against his own fleet every weekend.

Winter is Coming, Sailors.... I mean, Winter is Coming, Sellers!   Let's go.  

ASK Sandler works with driven organizations in Manitoba to help them grow their people, grow their business, and grow themselves.

If you want to build stronger beliefs and behaviours inside your sales team, come be our guest in a class or book a 15-minute chat.