In this episode, you’re going to learn the 5 traits of the worlds top, performing sales professionals. I’m also going to share how you can test if you have some of these sales traits, completely free at the end.
If you’re a fan of the Salesman.org Youtube channel, you’ll know we create sales success training content based around specific traits of sales success. But today in this video I’m going to give you a high level overview of 5 of the traits that all high level sales professionals possess so that you can start to implement them into your sales game too.
#1 No people pleasing
The first trait of high performing sales professionals is to avoid being a “people pleaser”. I define a people pleaser as –
“Someone who will please others at the expense of their own needs”.
Whilst the act of “people pleasing” might on the surface seem like a positive trait to have for a sales professional, it isn’t. B2B selling is all about –
Giving AND taking value.
People pleasers tend to give in abundance and expect the prospect to respond in kind. When they don’t, the people pleaser become passive aggressive towards them rather than being assertive in making their asks.
Think of it this way, when a extremely high level deal maker like Warren Buffet walks into the room, do you think he exhibits people pleasing behaviour of –
- Constantly agreeing with people
- Feeling personally responsible for how other people feel
- Having an inability to say “no”
- Feeling uncomfortable is someone is angry
- Changing your behaviour to make others comfortable
Of course he doesn’t. He walks into the room, is himself and gets the deal done. So if you exhibit any of the people pleasing behaviours I just outlined, you need to knock this negative trait out of yourself.
#2 Aggressively qualifying
Next, high performing sales professionals aggressively qualify and disqualify their prospects.
Successful people lack time. They’re busy and so they won’t allow themselves to waste time on unqualified prospects.
When talking to your potential customers, ask questions that judge whether they’re a good fit for you.
A simple qualification process follows the acronym BANT –
- Budget: Is the prospect capable of buying?
- Authority: Does your contact have adequate authority to sign off on a purchase?
- Need: Does the prospect have a business pain you can solve?
- Timeline: When is the prospect planning to buy?
When you uncover if a prospect is qualified by asking the following questions, you immediately reduce the risk of wasting time with prospects who like talking but will never spend cash with you –
- Budget: Is this an important enough priority to allocate funds toward?
- Authority: Who else will be involved in the purchasing decision?
- Need: What do you think could solve this problem? Why?
- Timeline: How quickly do you need to solve your problem?
Qualify quick and aggressivity at the top of the sales process as that’s what the worlds top sales professionals do.
#3 Plan ahead
Thirdly, the sales elite plan ahead
Rarely can a salesperson just stroll into a sales pitch, make it up as they go along and have success. That would be like walking out into a thunderstorm with the expectation that you’re not going to get wet or punching a gorilla in the nose and assuming that it’s not going to then pin you down and eat your face.
Successful salespeople take time to prepare what they’re going to say to their prospects before they meet them. If a client senses that you’re just making stuff up on the spot they will see this as laziness on your part and will reject you faster than when I got rejected asking Sarah to the high school dance when I was 12. Damn it Sarah!
Taking time to plan your selling communications not only makes you look good, it will take away a lot of the sales stress that the average sales professionals live in day to day.
#4 Always be advancing
Whilst the 80’s selling adage of “always be closing” might not be true anymore. Successful sales professionals live by the saying –
“Always be advancing”.
Don’t settle for the classic “thanks, I’ll call you next week with an update” when pitching to a prospect. They’re politely giving you the brush off here as either –
- They haven’t understood the value that you’re offering (and we’ll cover this in a second…)
- Or that the that pain that your product eliminates isn’t a priority for them right now
This means that, (going back to trait number 2) if you’ve already aggressively qualified the prospect, and they’re a good candidate for your product then you NEED to get a follow up meeting booked in. You need to advance the sale and keep control of the engagement.
If you allow the prospect to take control of the next contact point you will have yet another “I’m not sure what’s happening with this one” deal in your CRM that looks super awkward when you run a pipeline review with your sales manager.
So the fourth trait of the worlds most elite sales professionals is that they always advance the deal. If they can’t advance it, they consider it a lost cause and dump it. They can then focus their time with prospects that they can move through the sales process.
#5 Pitch value not price
Finally, the world’s top sales professionals have the trait of pitching value, not price.
Let me show you how the worlds top sales professionals define value, price and cost which will make this point simpler to explain –
- Price is what you pay
- Cost the money to produce a product
- Value revenue generated for the prospect
So the price of a product is made up with the formula –
PRICE = COST + % OF VALUE
OR…
Price = Cost (hard costs of production, development etc) + Value (a percentage of the income generated)
So for example, if my product generates 50% more profit for the prospect, I take 10% of that for my hard work in making it happen.
Now, when we take this theory and put it into action to discuss our pricing with a prospect – they will often understand the costs as they’re usually pretty tangible. For example, to make this cup, I need £1 of raw materials.
But there’s a gap between high performing sales people and those that are not having huge success when it comes to communicating the less tangible “value” element that makes up the over all price.
Poor performing sales people instantly offer discounts because they don’t understand where the value element of the overall price comes from. Don’t do this…
One high performer way to discuss the value is to do what I did in my example and calculate the value as a percentage of the revenue being generated.
If you tell a prospect that “I’ll increase your revenue by $10 million dollars this quarter for just $100,000 dollars plus the hard costs of an additional $50,000” they’d jump at your offer, right?
So pitch your price as it relates to value and you’ll never have anyone pull their faces at it.
So there we have it, 5 traits of the worlds highest performing sales professionals.
If you’d like to test yourself to see if you have some of these traits, head over to SalesCodeAssessment.com where you can take a completely free, sales trait assessment.
Your SalesCode assessment takes less than 7 minutes to complete and will show you exactly what high performer sales traits you have and the ones that you don’t.
And with that #SalesNation, I’ll see you in tomorrows video
