The front row of sales training courses will often have the best salesperson sitting there trying to get even better. The salesperson who is failing or is a mediocre performer is nowhere to be found or is there, but is solidly resisting the content and approach. I read this many years ago and decided I would attend all sales training I could get and that I would be in that front row because I wanted to meet the top performers. I walk the talk and recently I attended a webinar on sales for a Chamber of Commerce being run by my competitor. I wasn’t there to spy but there to learn. In the same vein, I read books on sales and listen to podcasts of the subject. I was listening to one recently where the guest being interviewed mentioned four excellent attributes in salespeople. He noted Coachability, Urgency, Resilience and Curiosity.
You would say that is pretty obvious and fair enough, but still these are not always present in salespeople. Coachability is an interesting one. At the superficial level people say they are ready to learn, to improve but the rubber meets the road when it comes to changing habits and shaping behaviours. In fact, they are not really coachable because they resist change, even though they are not doing well in sales and have in fact never done especially well in sales. You would think their numbers would inform them that they need to try a new approach, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. They are in their Comfort Zone and they don’t want to emerge from there, to do what is needed to improve.
Sales has a big accountability aspect to it. Sales leaders only take a certain amount of responsibility for their salespeople, because they see the individual has to be accountable for their inputs and effort and really, it is up to them to do the work themselves. There isn’t a lot of hand holding going on in the world of sales management, because the exit door is the preferred mechanism to solve problematic salespeople who won’t change or can’t improve. There is no great appetite to rescue them. For Japan, this won’t work anymore though and the rescue part or the amelioration part is becoming more needed. Declining population, in particular declining youth population, means there is a shortage of staff and especially salespeople. We can’t expect even competent people anymore and have to take what we can get. That also means we have to pump more energy into getting them to be effective in sales.
Urgency is about speed of taking action and having excellent time management methods in place. There is a lot to do in sales. As we get deals we get busier and when there aren’t any deals, we get busy trying to get clients – it doesn’t stop. Disorganised people get into sales and they stay disorganised making it hard to be successful. I will bet that if you peel back the factors behind why a salesperson is struggling, their poor time management skills will be a prominent factor. This is not complex though. The Time Management Quadrant Two – Not Urgent but Important is where the planning has to get done and the Urgent and Important is where we live for the rest of the time. Planning means setting out our goals and then matching our priority schedule against the time required to get them completed. The key is to plan first and then follow the plan, which seems to defeat the vast majority of salespeople. We have to work with a sense of time poor urgency to make sure we can get everything done, which needs to get done and we need to know what is the order in which it should be done.
Resilience is all about self-belief in the face of rejection and failure. I have to keep in mind they are not rejecting Greg Story. They are rejecting my offer in this business cycle, at this point in the financial year, at this point in their internal planning, in this offer’s current format, at this particular price point, with their sense of relative value, etc. Winston Churchill’s great quote is needed for salespeople about “going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm?”.
Most of the time we fail in sales. Most of the time the client doesn’t make a decision or goes with a competitor or rejects our offer. There is a fine line between learning from failure and being overwhelmed with self-doubt. Of course, we have to reflect on what we could have done better without beating ourselves up, such that we can’t get back in the saddle after having been thrown. It is easy to spiral down further when things are not going well, but we have to dust ourselves off and keep going. We need to do more study of the industry, the firm, the techniques of sales, do more role play practice, make a bigger effort to find prospects, make more calls and see more buyers.
Curiosity is about really trying to understand the buyer’s needs. If all you are doing is blabbing on endlessly about the features of your widget, then this idea has no meaning for you. If we have a genuine desire to fully understand what is driving the buyer’s problems, we are on the right track to find a solution. Or we will quickly discover they are not a buyer, because we don’t have what they need. We don’t waste any further time and we move on and find a real buyer. There is no point in manufacturing a “fake” desire to understand the client’s problems. If you are going to go to the effort at all, you may as well go deep and be sincere. The point is we are looking to solve their problems and to do that we need to be driven to analyse what is going on in the client’s world. We are not looking for a sale - we are looking for the re-order, because we bring such value to the buyer, that we become their trusted partner.
Each of these aspects of coachability, urgency, resilience and curiosity are obvious, but like many things in sales, obvious but not adopted and not actually applied in our everyday work. Tugging our forelock and genuflecting in the general direction of these truths is meaningless, unless we do something about mastering each aspect. How do you measure up on all four fronts and where can you do better? This is the mindset of the top performer sitting in the front row – how can I do more, better, easier, faster? If you are not the top performer, then here is a four point roadmap to employ and you can start right now – no signups needed and no waiting required.
