Episode 140: 8-Habits that Successful Sales People Own

For me, there's lots of different ways we can look at talent management, but for me, the area that I think will be most impactful and helpful to our listeners and to you is that we actually drill down into what is a really successful salesperson look like. So rather than focus at the sales leader level, let's have a look at the really common behaviors that we see come out from really high performing individual salespeople. Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits. Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Looking back over what's been a really terrific two and a half year journey of our podcast, and as we close in towards 150 episodes, one thing that stood out to me is how much great content has been delivered through the podcast. And in fact, some of the very early podcasts that we recorded were some of the best tried and tested content that I've been delivering with sales teams for almost 25 years. The type of content that is really worth revisiting after such a long period of time, and particularly because I know that the listener base has also changed, grown and evolved over that time. So for the next four weeks, we're going to do a blast from the past and revisit some of our finest Stronger Sales Teams podcast episodes. So this week we're going to have a look at the eight habits of highly successful salespeople. This one's also one that was recorded a couple of years ago, but gee, looking back, things really haven't changed. And I think for particularly experienced salespeople, we so often forget that some of the basics are the reasons that we actually are really good at what we do. So I love refreshing these myself. I will often look at some of these habits that come out of this episode. I hope you enjoy it and if nothing else, can find one of these habits that you can sharpen your axe on over the coming days and weeks. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams. The place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered B2B sales teams. So last week was a great episode on the market research results that we had published. I think I mentioned a few times. It was the largest piece of market research that ourselves as a business, but also that I have personally been involved in across my career. What came out of that really clearly was there was five key challenges for sales leaders in the year 2023 and beyond. It was all about talent management, building trust with customers, retaining existing customers, and essentially key account management, social selling, and last but not least, was around using technology in businesses. So today, primarily because we love to focus in this podcast on the big, important impactful stuff, we're going to deep dive around the number one area that came up as a challenge and that was talent management over the next 12 months and beyond. For me, there's lots of different ways we can look at talent management, but for me, the area that I think will be most impactful and helpful to our listeners and to you is that we actually drill down into what does a really successful salesperson look like. So rather than focus at the sales leader level, let's have a look at the really common behaviors that we see come out from really high performing individual salespeople. So I think there's eight and we're going to go through eight of these. And I will say this list is not extensive. You are going to find that there are salespeople who are good at other areas but are fantastic or miss some of these areas are fantastic. But what this is is a really general checklist that for you as a sales leader you can use because it primarily is just daunting to be able to be across everything needed as a sales leader. There are so many skills that are required for sales individuals that we just simply can't be across everything. But hopefully this will give you a compartmentalized view as to where you can start to look at some of the key traits that are really common in high performing salespeople. So let's get into it. I'll provide some examples as we go, as always, and hopefully you can take something really strong and chunky out of today's episode. Okay, so number one in terms of the eight things that I see successful salespeople who deliver consistent results do is they focus on expanding their reach. I want to be really clear here. This doesn't mean they are prolific cold callers. Some of the best networking salespeople that I've ever met are terrible cold callers. I can personally sit here now and say, I do not like cold calling, but I recognize that at times it's a part of my role. But more importantly that what's critical for me to nail and for salespeople and individuals to nail is that they continuously expand their reach so their network grows and grows. So how do they do this? It can be through networking, it can be through content creation, it can be through building internal relationships, right, with stakeholders within your business who then have their own network that they introduce you to. It can be through past customers or even referrals from existing customers. The key here is that they want to increase their influence and their reach, right? Which naturally opens up opportunities. The more people you meet, the more people you're involved in, the more things you do, the more opportunities that you have. So in terms of how prospecting, which we can also call this changing, it actually is quite significant in the post Covid era, right? There's less and less about expanding your reach with face to face time and more and more about expanding your reach through content and through other types of areas, particularly around technology. If you want to have a really deep dive on how prospecting is evolving, jump back to episode 18. And we went through with Colin Mitchell some really fantastic ways as to how things are evolving in the prospecting landscape. But the message is really clear. Great salespeople who consistently deliver are always expanding their reach. So as a leader, the challenge for you is to how do you encourage this across your team so that people in your team are consistently building out their networks? I love it when we see it embedded into one to ones those weekly meetings. Hopefully you're doing them weekly by now where you'll have slightly more individual programs and, and at a micro level, you can work with your sales individuals to help them build out their program and supplement any learning they need to do to be expanding their reach. But without doubt, absolutely critical. They must be expanding their reach and increasing their influence to consistently be bringing in results. Okay, number two that I'm seeing, again, a really strong impactful one, is that the great salespeople, the consistent salespeople, they spend lots of time understanding the problem the customer has or the opportunity they're trying to capitalize on before they get into talking about their brand or their business or them as an individual. So they really want to know that the customers are clear that they care before they talk about how much they know. So I, Ben Wright, in front of my fantastic new customer, cares deeply about what you're trying to achieve. I, Ben, right, want to understand what your problems are, I'd like to understand what the opportunities you have are before I even bother talking about us. So what this essentially means is they are great at asking questions. They will ask, they will listen and then they will respond. If we take this to another and even higher level is when they're asking questions, they're actually listening to what the answer is and then determining their response. And great salespeople have practised or are really aware as to what the likely answers are to those questions. So they're able to have a broad structure that they can bring to their response that doesn't require them to be experts at thinking on their feet, but it requires them to be experts at their job and what they do. So then they're very clear as to what those solutions can be. So for me, the best example I see here is a really basic question and it goes like this. So what does success look like from buying the new equipment? What does success look like from reducing your expenses? What does success look like from solving the issue or capitalizing on the problem? Right. It's a very easy question to ask. But if we're looking at that, at a more broad framework, essentially the great salespeople here, they're trying to find out what the problem or the opportunity to solve is, what does the outcome look like for the customer and when do they need to get it done by. So if you know what the problem is, what does the solution look like and when do they need to get it done? That's some really fantastic and powerful active listening that the great salespeople can, I see, do time and time and time again. Okay, number three is they handle objections. They really handle objections consistently. And that's generally through asking lots of questions about where the customer's at in their journey. So objection handling, no doubt, it's an art. It's a very difficult part of the sales process to master. And there are lots and lots of models out there, most of the early adopters, from a leader point of view, that take on some form of objection handling framework. They'll use the feel felt found model, which is feel. I understand how you feel. Felt. Well, we found that other customers also felt this way, but found here's what they've done about it. So we found that we can overcome this by doing something similar or our customers have overcome this by speaking to case studies or testimonials or whatever it may be. Right. So it's a very basic principle and not one that I would say that most teams I work with use Extensively. But they tend to use it as a starting point for them that allows them to create a form of structure into their rejection handling. So let's have a look at an example of that. So if we took that feel, felt found and said, how do we build something out for us as a team? That's a process that works. We might look at, first of all, classifying the problems. So classic example of objection handling is I don't know if your solution is going to work. Right. So great. We know one of the objections we're going to receive regularly is I don't know if your solution's going to work. Then the second piece comes around that says, okay, well, we need to acknowledge as to how the customer feels. I understand that. And other customers have felt this way. But where this gets really savvy from an objection handling point of view is that we actually specifically can mention customers who are related in the same industry. So that might be if we're in an engineering type of business, we will talk about their competitors or we will talk about engineering businesses in slightly different fields. So instead of them being engineering for buildings, they might be engineering for cars. We can find some social proof in being really explicit in terms of how others had the same issues. And then the third area, so what do we do about it? How do we overcome that? Well, that's where we can start to roll in. Okay, so I understand that you're concerned if our solution will work, and that's very reasonable. And we certainly had engineering company ABC that had the same issue. So how do we actually help them overcome this issue that they were having was we actually referred them to their engineering counterparts in vehicles instead of buildings they were building engineers like yourselves, we actually referred them to some car engine and showed them how they were using that technology. We also showed them that their local state government has actually taken that on. But more importantly is we provided a guarantee and the guarantee was balance sheeted by our company. That gave them a level of comfort that if it didn't work, they were able to have a full refund of the project. So we classified what the problem was there. We referenced others in a similar industry who were having that same issue. And then we spoke about ways we can get around that. So if we as a team can actually build that across multiple objections around we don't know if solutions will work, or we think your competitors have a better offer, or we don't want to spend the money now, or we're not sure the return on investment is strong enough, or we're really busy, and we're just not sure we can get to it in time. Right. If we can build out set plays to each of those objections, then what we do is we have a really powerful tool that can be used out consistently by our salespeople. For me, if we can roll that out with our salespeople, we are then starting to mimic what some of the really successful individual contributors do. Okay, so. Objection. Handling. There was a little bit in there, but I think it was really important that we focused not only on what the successful salespeople we work with do, but how we could provide you some advice on how you can go about evolving that for your team. Okay, so that's the first three. Number four successful salespeople that we work with, they very, very often will reach the ultimate decision maker in the process. So they definitely don't get their first go. It takes some time. And certainly if you're able to get to a decision maker at your first pitch, you are a very, very either fortunate individual or incredibly strategic in terms of how you're getting out to your customers. But what they do, these successful salespeople, they actually get to the decision makers before it comes to decision time. And this takes skill. Because to get to the decision makers, particularly in a world when there are now multiple, we see 6 to 7 in the majority of the deals that we're working with. But where there are multiple decision makers in a process, we need to make sure that we are influencing as many of them as we can, but in particular the key decision makers. So what the successful salespeople that I've seen do this recognize is that allowing someone else to sell internally for them is a flawed methodology. So what do we mean by that? So we go and present, and we'll stick with an engineering solution. We go and present our new engineering solution to a customer whose job is then to present to the CEO of the board. What the successful sales people and teams that we've seen really handle this well do, is they won't let that person sell internally for them, because not only are they not experts in selling your technology, but they're also having to pass through secondhand your key information. So what these individual contributors learn how to do is either to get to the decision makers themselves, and that will be through seeding across an organization, more networking, providing video updates, bringing multiple people into the meetings, or even one of the best ways I've seen work is when there is a board meeting or a CEO meeting, is they actually make themselves available so they're there ready to be included in a teams or a zoom style meeting. They're in the lobby, if it's a board meeting, waiting, they're on the phone, they're available, and they make sure that there's some really key areas, some really key benefits that their internal champion will have from exposing them to the decision maker. So I'll say that again, there's some really clear benefits for the internal champion of a project for them to be able to put this salesperson in front of the ultimate decision maker. Right? So it not only helps for the salesperson to move through their process, but it also makes the person that they're dealing with look more competent, look more savvy, look like they've really engaged all options in terms of the sales process. So they are experts, certainly the best salespeople, the individual contributors we work with, they are experts at reaching the ultimate decision maker, the key decision maker, more often than not. Okay, number five, they contribute to team success. Please don't mistake this for them being great team players because unfortunately it isn't a prerequisite to be really good at your job to be a great team player. That doesn't mean we tolerate poor behaviour, but it doesn't necessarily mean they are the best team players. But what they do do is they contribute to team success. So they're really good at engaging with their colleagues, helping them when they have issues, or providing perspectives when they have issues so that they are seen as a person that is engaged in the success of others. Okay, so what this helps each of these individual salespeople do is it actually allows them to learn new viewpoints. So by engaging themselves in contributing to team success and helping others when they need to, they're learning more viewpoints and getting better and better themselves. They're learning what's working, what's not, working with other people's customers in similar instances. That expands their own database of social proof. Right. So now of course, this often includes helping their colleagues, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're going out of their way or attending pitches or spending a significant amount of time contributing to team success. But they're using their knowledge and their advice when they need to to not only help their team succeed, but also improve their own level of learning. So in terms of as a sales leader, how you can foster this for your team growth, I would try and get these people front and center with your teams to provide their solutions and their advice as often as you possibly can. What we'll see happen out of that is not only will they contribute to team success, but others will be dragged along for the ride and tend to continue to help themselves. Right. So we're putting these people up in lights internally. Okay, so that's number five. Number six is really successful salespeople that we see consistently delivering results how have an appetite to learn that doesn't diminish with their experience. Too often I see salespeople that have been in the industry or been salespeople themselves for really long periods of time and their appetites to learn have soured. Or they take the attitude that says, you know what? I know what I'm doing, leave me be. Those that continually succeed, they are all about learning new things. Because as the last few years has shown us, perhaps in a more impactful way than normal, but certainly what they've shown us is that if you don't continue to learn and evolve, you will not sell. So those salespeople that are still relying on face to face selling as their absolute number one requirement, more often than not, they are not succeeding right now. There are of course, exceptions to this and there are of course face to face salespeople that continue to do well, but those people that are succeeding now versus three years ago have learned how to embrace remote selling, video selling, influencing and building relationships via other means than face to face. Right. It also helps them avoid bad habits creeping in because the more you're learning, the more you're actually re cementing some of the basics of selling, which stops some of those habits that can come into your repertoire. Stops them, keeps them at bay. Right. So I'm going to have a whole future podcast around learning and what we do as a business and what I do as an individual to really keep me learning at a rapid rate. However, a bit of a sneak preview, I guess, on this one is that it's all about creating structures to learn that can be built into your day. Right? So having content learning, so subscribing to really impactful newsletters or subscriptions or types of information sources that you know work for you. It's listening to podcasts when you're doing something else. Right. So it's not about stopping to have to learn. It's learning from your peers at the most appropriate moments. It's learning from team training sessions, whether you're running them or not, from coaching, from mentoring. There's lots and lots of ways you can learn. Just need to make sure that you have your mind open to be recording those learnings as much as you possibly can. So absolutely without question, in my mind, it's critical that for individual salespeople to be succeeding, they need to be open and driving new learning as often as they possibly can. I'll leave this one with actually a personal example before we jump onto number seven. And that's myself. I had to make a presentation last week and I hadn't yet embraced using AI to do a presentation. For me, I actually used a tool that I put all of the content into this tool. So it was all my thinking. But what it did was it spat out the graphical design for me. That was really impactful for me because it actually allowed me to spend less time on the design and more time on the thinking and the content, which resulted in a better pitch and presentation deck for me. That wouldn't have happened if I wasn't open to self learning and driving that. So for me, classic example as to how you can succeed here. All right, number seven, we've got two more to go. So really effective salespeople, they use a very small number of metrics to drive their behaviors. Generally, the great individual contributors that we've worked with, they don't get too hung up on significant depth in their sales metrics. They look at things like number of customer meetings, number of proposals that they're getting out, size of their active pipeline, close rates, actual sales results. They keep it really nice and sharp in terms of what they're measuring because they know their game plan really well. And then when one of those metrics is off, so say, for example, number of customer meetings is low, they will instantly recognize that, wow, actually I'm not seeing enough customers. This is going to impact the amount of quotes I'm doing, which is going to reduce my size of my active pipeline and in turn eventually lead to lower results. I need to pivot and spend a little bit more time on generating some new business and prospecting. Right. Same would be with active pipeline. If your active pipeline is starting to drop, then they can drill down into that and say, hey, is it dropping because I'm not spending enough time generating new business? Am I generating the wrong types of customers? Am I closing them too early? Is there something wrong in my pitch? Right, and they'll really allow them to drill down. But just by focusing on a few metrics, it avoids that haze of indecision or haze of uncertainty as to when things are going wrong. We actually have a very similar approach here. I've spoken about our three box model, which is@strongersalesteam.com number three box. So three box, you can download that. It's a free resource. It's fantastic for measuring sales metrics, but I consistently see that across great performing salespeople that they keep it simple. Okay, last but not least, we've alluded to something similar to this in the first seven, but highly successful salespeople have customer as their main focus. They are always on top of their customer's journey, where they're at, what needs to happen next, Right? What are the roadblocks? What's the objections? As we've spoken about, they're really invested in their success. So when you can be so invested in someone's success, it just helps you build relationships, build strength, build credibility, and allows you to then move forward with far more confidence with those customers. So for me personally, as a sales leader, when I'm trying to identify if a salesperson is on top of their customer game and if customers really are, their focus is I'll actually talk through their deals or their projects with them because it becomes really obvious when a salesperson is across all of their deals because they can talk them through with you without referring to notes. So great little tool one. You can try it yourself and please feel free to let me know how it goes. Okay, so we've gone through eight areas which I've really clearly labeled as not the exclusive areas that we see successful salespeople succeeding at, but certainly eight of the most common areas where we see really good, consistent individual contributors perform at. Number one was all about expanding reach their network. Number two was understanding the customer's problem to solve an opportunity that's at hand. Number three was objection handling. So it's omnipresent in everything they do and they have a really great structure behind it. Number four was they know how to reach the ultimate decision maker. Number five was they contribute to team success. So they're part of the team and they're happy to add value. Number six, an appetite to learn. An insatiable appetite to learn. Number seven, they use small metrics, so they really focus on some key areas of managing their performance. And number eight, their customer is their focus. Right. So they're really on top of their game with their customers and they know exactly where they're at. Okay, so what would I recommend you do from here to see how your team's going in these type of areas? First thing I'd do is at a team level, I would have a look yourself as to how they're going to. So measure your team across those eight metrics, perhaps give them a number out of 10 and have a look how they're going. Then I'd also do that at an individual level. So at a team level you will find opportunities, for example, to spend more time on reaching the ultimate decision maker. Right. Or objection handling. And you can roll that out at a team training level. But then what you might find is one person within your team actually they're not reaching decision makers because they have actually stopped expanding their reach. So they're not getting out to enough customers, they're being a little bit lazy in their prospecting and you can start to work with them at that level. If you're doing this, I would strongly encourage you to get your team to self rate also before they look into this. So then you can actually have a level of congruence in what you're talking through. And more importantly, if you see things differently, it allows you to have a really productive discussion as to what you can do about it. So if you see some areas of opportunity, I really hope you do set some goals, set some dates to achieve them by, diarize them and then review progress at those dates. I'd love to know how you go. So please, if you have time to get in contact and tell me what worked and what didn't. Okay, so final word on this is again, just to be really clear, these are not the only metrics of successful salespeople. So please use these as a guide. If you find something else that your teams are really successful at, that's absolutely fine. But if you can find one or two things out of this that are going to work really well for your team to improve, then I'll be really pleased for the 25 or 30 minutes you've spent listening to the podcast. Okay, so lots that we went through there. If you weren't able to capture all of that, please jump onto the show notes in your own time. They're on the website or on your podcast directory, the website being stronger. Salesteams.com Also, if you'd like some help, please book in a free discovery call with me. I love helping people. Specifically, I love spending the time to work out exactly what you might need. You can get me through social media or directly through the business and I'm across every connection that comes in, so we'd love to hear from you. But before we leave today, our health and wellbeing tip. I've been focusing quite a lot on mental health with these and I'm going to continue to do so for another week or two. But today I want to talk a little bit about what happens when you're feeling anxious. Feeling anxious is really normal and it's something that affects lots of us at very, very different times in our lives. I can say really openly that anxiety is something that I have had to battle with constantly throughout my career. I'm not afraid to talk about it, but I am very conscious of making sure I do something about it. So I have two hacks that I use when I'm feeling anxious. The first one, which is probably the most important for me, is that I cure anxiety with action. So when I'm nervous or worried or upset about something, I will generally try to determine what the issue is and think about some small items. Much like the tip I gave last week about ensuring that you break the complex into simple steps is I'll actually break that down and then get really busy and that then helps me move forward and build momentum. The second one is, and this is actually from a statistic that I heard from one of the businesses that I coach. So thank you Cameron for sharing this. What we worry about, 80% of the time doesn't come through. I think the exact number was 83%. So 8 out of 10 times when we are worried about something, it doesn't actually come through. And then of the remainder, almost 20% that's left. Only 15% of that is when we see the worst case come true. So that number actually equates out when you pull those numbers back. That means once in 33 times that we worry does it actually come true. So what that says to me is there are 32 out of 33 times that worrying is a complete waste of time. So that's the second hack that I use. The first one being I cure anxiety with action, but the second one is to just talk myself through that. You don't actually know what's going to happen, right? Be prepared that the worst may happen, nothing may happen, or the best may happen, but on the balance of probability, you're probably going to be okay. And this too shall pass. Right is where I end up with this beautiful one liner of this too shall pass. And I use it really regularly. Okay? So hopefully that health or that wellbeing tip will really help you when you're having some challenging times. But until next time, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thank you everyone. 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