Video: 2 Common Traits of Top Performing Sales People

As we emerge from lock-down, your sales team need to be on top of their game. I’ve hired and trained hundreds of sales people over the last 20 years, watch this video to find out the top two traits I think you need to look for.

Video Transcript:

Now, as we emerge from lockdown, your sales team needs to be on top of their game. I've hired and trained hundreds of salespeople over the last 20 years. And here's the top two traits that I think you need to look out for and develop in your sales team.

Number one, their ability to challenge their customer’s thinking. A salesperson that every customer likes is rarely the top biller. They may enjoy spending time in meetings and customers will often say nice things about them, but they don't challenge a customer's thinking often enough, because they're too busy worrying about what the customer might be thinking, and worry their customer might not want to hear the kind truth.

What you need to encourage all salespeople the challenge of providing assumptions in their customer's businesses. They need to be confident in challenging stakeholders to take action and trust your company to solve their problem. This might enable those clients of yours to move faster, to innovate quicker, to save time, or whatever the value it is that your company adds.

The second thing that I think great salespeople share is their ability to invite customers into a story. Now, a lot of salespeople do a decent job of telling their company story, how they have helped other companies, and how great their product or service is. But all salespeople often fail to beat their sales targets.

Now, the consistent difference with top salespeople, is they recognize that customers are not interested in your company's story, how many years you've been around, how many awards you've won, or whatever it might be that you're celebrating as a business internally. The fact is that great salespeople know that customers are looking for someone to be their guide, someone to help them solve a specific problem that's causing them frustration.

Now, this is about the customer, not your company, and that's the key with the narrative of these great salespeople. So, how do these top performers do it?

Well, first, they seek out three key pieces of information; what the customer wants, what's getting in the way of what that customer wants, and how that’s causing the customer to feel. Now, they validate what their customers are looking for, and what they're looking to achieve. They look at what does success look like if they engage with your product or service. They’ll consider what does success look like for the individual stakeholders within your customer’s business as well.

They also validate what their customers are looking to avoid. So what's actually at stake here, what are the consequences of not taking action and engaging with your product or service? What's the risk for the client personally if they don't resolve the problem that they are facing? Now, great salespeople with this information are able to connect the product or solution back to the customer’s specific needs, and more specifically, describe how the customer can resolve an internal frustration, so how that frustration is causing them to feel, how this problem is causing them to feel.

Finally, they're able to remind the customer, what's at stake throughout the sales process, if they don't engage with you and how great life could be if they do. This is all a delicate balancing act, but with the right messaging in each sales conversation, each sales email and proposal, the results are astounding. So, if you need help getting your sales team performing at their best, get in touch. I'll be happy to help.