INNERGISE!

As salespeople, and sales managers, it is often useful to remind ourselves of how high performing sales people are different from those that are merely average in comparison.

In most sales training courses that I have experienced, the focus is often around developing a “toolkit” to drive sales performance. In other words, what are the things you need to be doing and saying every day in order to achieve exceptional sales outcomes. These tools are a vital part of any salesperson’s armoury and will play a significant role in determining your success.

However, where average salespeople become unstuck is often not from the lack of implementation of these tools, but from their overall behaviours when doing so. In other words, there are certain attitudinal skills that salespeople need to employ in order to maximise their chances of success and outperform other sales professionals.

For the majority, these are skills that can be learned, but very rarely taught.

A way to understand this better is to look towards the retired American businessman and thought leader, Jack Welch, for an insight.

During Welch’s 20 year term as CEO and Chairman of GE, which saw revenues rise by a multiple of 5, he introduced the affectionately entitled “Rank and Yank” concept to the business as a way of assessing the individual productivity of his employees.

In essence, each year Welch would ask each of the GE businesses to rank their top executives across a 20 / 70 / 10 matrix based on their productivity. The top 20% (he referred to these as the “A” players) were those employees who were the most productive in the business, the bottom 10% (the “C” players) were the least productive and the other 70% (the “B” players) sat somewhere in the middle:

Welch’s philosophy was to focus his attention on rewarding the Top 20% for their efforts and, in essence, remove the bottom 10% from the business (hence the term “Rank and Yank”).

Many organisations across the globe have embedded this model into their working practices, and yet, even for those that haven’t, without doubt you will always be able to find a top 20%, a middle 70% and a bottom 10% across their employees based on their productivity and performance. This is especially so when it comes to sales teams.

The interesting part of all this is when we start identifying what actually is the difference between the people themselves (above and beyond their productivity). In other words, what do these A players all have in common that enables them to become a top 20% performer?

If you think back to the those top salespeople you have met or worked with in the past, even those that you currently work with, what are those key qualities that is concurrent across each of them?

Having worked with and trained thousands of salespeople in my career, time and time again the following list of traits come to mind when I think of those top 20% that I know:

• Personality – people quite like them as a person and naturally gravitate towards them
• Persistence – they don’t give up on an opportunity easily
• Networking – they create active networks around them where people are talking about them to other people
• Knowledge – they know what they are talking about (markets, products, customers)
• Solution Focused – they are looking to provide solutions for customers key issues or needs
• Confidence and Belief – in themselves as much as in their products and services
• Effective Communicators – they know how to successfully listen as well as how to convey a message
• Positively Challenging – they are willing to challenge customer thinking in a positive way
• Customer Centric – they ensure their sales is supported by a high level of service delivery
• Innovators – they are always looking at new and better ways of maximising performance, productivity and profitability

When I look at this list, many of them seem to have one key thing in common – they are attitudinal behaviours more so than actual skills, not the “what we do”, but the “how we do it” side of selling.

So the question you should be asking yourselves, is do you have the right attitude to be successful in sales?