Читать книгу Ten Ways Top Sales Reps Are Different - Duane Lakin - Страница 4

Not all sales jobs are alike. If you look at the jobs that are called “sales”, you will see that some are order-taking jobs. Some include delivery of the service or product. Some are one-time sales while some require maintenance of a relationship. Some require a seller who can speak knowledgeably about highly technical details, while others require creative selling of intangibles.

To be successful in any of these sales jobs, the individual must meet the job requirements for that specific situation. Perhaps some can be “challengers” while others need to be “missionaries”. Every sales job has unique character-istics that must be respected. What determines success in any specific sales job is job specific.

Therefore, it should not be surprising to hear that not all sales people are alike. They don’t look alike or sell in the same way. When test sellers want to “profile” your top performers to build a model of the traits that will create success for you in future hires, they are often very successful…at selling tests.

Try this: Take your top sales producers and put them in a room. Do they look alike? Do they dress in a similar way? Do they sound alike? Do they have similar interests? Are they all extroverts? Are they all verbal?

Probably not!

Any group of Top Sales Reps is more likely to include more individual differences then similarities on the surface. It is only beneath the surface that you can begin to under-stand and see that a Top Sales Rep thinks in a unique way when compared with an average producer.

Yet writers are constantly telling us “Fifteen things that make a sales person great!” Then we see a list like the following:

Positive self-image (confidence)

Passion

Integrity

Ambition

Dependability

Gregariousness

Empathy

Energy/Persistence

Hunger for money

Comfortable talking about money

Assertiveness

Durability

Ego strength

Positive attitude

Hard working

Thick-skinned

Lists like this may tell us what characteristics are needed to succeed in sales. They might make good checklists for interviewing sales candidates. But these characteristics do not really show us anything that is unique about Top Sales Reps—those who are consistently high producers in any setting.

If you look at the above list, you will see great ideas about what a seller needs to be effective. But some weak sellers may also have these characteristics. Haven’t you seen an average seller who is still confident and committed? Many average sellers are sociable, friendly, outgoing. Any seller who has sold for more than two years has to have learned to be thick-skinned. And if a seller doesn’t have integrity, he/she will not last long in any setting. “Hard working” seems obvious as a success requirement, yet I have known Top Sales Reps who do not work particularly hard. They work smart but not necessarily hard. How about “Positive Self-Image?” I have seen Top Sales Reps who have awful self-image issues, yet they can put on a mask in a sales situation and appear confident and assertive. These lists are interesting, but they do not tell us much about Top Sales Reps.

Psychologists talk about the “Big Five.” These are traits that describe people and represent five independent dimensions: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Yet, these “super-traits” do not tell us much about sales people, especially Top Sales Reps. In fact, most research has found that only Conscientiousness helps predict work performance in general.

So what does it take to be a great sales person, a Top Sales Rep? It depends. It depends on the sales job and the environment. And in fact, the magic formula is not known.

The basic problem with these lists is that they are a list of traits and attitudes that sound good. Probably many Top Sales Reps have most of these traits. But so do a lot of average sellers.

But Top Sales Reps actually do things differently. They see the world differently. And they often do the right things for reasons that may not necessarily correlate to an assumed trait. Just looking for a list of traits in a candidate can be misleading.

Traits help us describe the dynamics that make up the personality of a person. They can sometimes help us understand a person’s potential as well as inherent limitations if not addressed. Absent or missing traits can be as important as positive active traits in helping us to understand observed behavior. (If a person is missing “integrity”, it can explain a lot of observed behavior!)

Behaviors are more prone to change or to react to the environment than are traits. If a trait is strong enough, it can drive a behavior. But we cannot always know which is the driving trait. Even when looking at a specific behavior, you cannot always be sure what is driving it. The seller who is confident and assertive in the way he/she talks to a prospect may be driven to that behavior by insecurities rather than ego strength, for instance.

The only way to understand a behavior is to ask questions of the person doing the behaving. Why are you doing that? What are you saying to yourself? This is the basis of “modeling”, an approach to understanding others that is much stronger than test profiling but also much more time consuming and requires a skilled investigator.

In order to understand Top Sales Reps, it is necessary to understand the behaviors that are occurring and what is driving those behaviors. Top Sales Reps have “drivers” that may not be easily seen. Understanding those drivers can help a Sales Manager do a better job of looking for Top Sales Rep candidates as well as helping a Top Sales Rep continue to excel.

It is unusual for someone to move in a linear fashion from being an average seller to being a Top Sales Rep. Being a top-producing sales rep is more than just developing new skills and learning the product/service. Top Sales Reps are different. Their behaviors are different. Their motivation and drivers are different. Average sellers may have some of these same characteristics, but they will not have all of them. When you interview for a Top Sales Rep, you need to look for different things and ask different questions. When you manage a Top Sales Rep, you must manage with an understanding of their differences and needs. They are a different animal. Choose and care for them carefully.

So what makes a Top Sales Rep different? Some things are drivers, some are attitudes, and some are behaviors. But when combined, they describe most Top Sales Reps. The following characteristics and the way they impact the seller’s behavior are what make a Top Sales Rep different:

Fear/Anxiety

Short-term focus

Need to feel in control

Grit

Curiosity

Assumption of success

Use of plans and mental re-plays

Social intelligence

Referral requests

Use of mirroring