Do you have what it takes to have success in sales?
Now of course, you need to work hard, have the right sales process and strategy to have success in sales… but there’s something else you need as well.
You need the personality traits of a high performer.
Let me ask you this, have you ever felt like you’re knowledgeable about the service you sell, you’re able to get in front of qualified buyers but you’re not living up to your selling potential?
Then it’s likely you’re missing one of the six sales personality traits that I’m going to share with you in this video.
So if you want to improve your selling performance, stay tuned.
SALES SUCCESS PYRAMID
I want you to imagine success in sales looking like a pyramid.
On the ground level we have the foundation that is holding everything else up and that is your personality.
Built on top of this we have your sales process, the profile you have in your industry, and the amount of practice you do to hone your skills.
We need each of the four layers of the pyramid to reach sales success.
But the most fundamental of all of them is your personality.
SIX PERSONALITY TRAITS
I’m going to share with you six personality traits that we’ve gleaned from research with over 100,000 sales professionals, from five years of research at Salesman.org.
Whilst these personality traits don’t guarantee you sales success, having them means that you’re less likely to hold yourself back.
If you imagine success being water travelling through a pipe at high speed, each one of the following personality traits that you lack equates to a leak springing in the pipe.
So if you’re missing a couple of these personality traits, you may eventually have sales success, what is going to reach you more slowly and it will take more effort to achieve.
#1: NOT A PEOPLE PLEASER
The first high performance personality trait is not being a “people pleaser”. Now this may seem counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t a people pleaser have better selling outcomes because they are constantly trying to help buyers?
Well the data shows that people pleasers tend to fail in sales.
I define a people pleaser as –
“Someone who will please others at the expense of their own needs”
This is a problem because success in B2B sales requires you to both give and take value.
So if you find yourself walking into your sales meetings and you’re consistently –
- Agreeing with people when you don’t mean it
- Feeling responsible for how other people feel
- Avoiding saying the word “no”
- Feeling uncomfortable when other people are angry
- Changing your behaviour to make others feel more comfortable
Then you have the personality trait of a people pleaser and you need to get rid of it .
#2: SOLID SELF ESTEEM
The next personality trait you need to develop to become a high-performing sales professional is to level up your self-esteem.
Having a high level of self-esteem means that you –
- Have confidence in your ability to cope with the basic challenges of sales and life
- Are confidence in your right to be successful and happy
When you have high levels of self-esteem, issues like feeling rejected when people don’t want to buy from you disappear.
High levels of self-esteem also allows you to take more leaps of faith. Our data confirms this and shows that the salespeople with the highest levels of self-esteem, tend to go after and close bigger deals.
#3: ASSERTIVENESS
Next we have assertiveness. At salesman.org we define being assertive as –
“Being able to ask for what you want”
Clearly, to have success in a sales role, where you have to constantly give and then take value from your buyers, assertiveness is a key personality trait.
Don’t get being assertive computers would be cocky or aggressive though.
If we draw a line that has being passive on one end and then being aggressive on the other, assertive behaviour would be in the middle.
When you exhibit assertiveness, everybody wins. When you’re being passive the buyer wins and you lose. Finally when you’re being aggressive, you win but the buyer loses.
#4: GOAL SETTING
We don’t know why some people are wired to set goals and other are people wired to drift through life passively but we do know that salespeople who set goals drive more revenue than salespeople who don’t.
When high-performing salespeople set goals, they make sure to look at their past performance and improve upon it, rather than shooting for the moon when there is no evidence of them heading towards it.
Think about your goal setting as laying bricks to build a house. Make sure you’re setting goals that allow you to take action and achieve something in the short term. So you can then build on top of them to have bigger success in the future.
#5: SUCCESS MINDSET
Another key attribute that all high-performing salespeople have is that they have what we call a “success mindset”.
There are a bunch of differences between salespeople who have a success mindset vs a fixed mindset –
- Success mindset – Believes that with effort, strategy and mentoring we can change our IQ, intelligence, sales skills and just about any of part of our personality. Therefore if we are changeable then no level of success is unreachable.
- Fixed mindset – Believes that we’re born with a certain IQ, intelligence and sales skill and we’re not in control of our own destiny. They believe that these traits are all locked in from a young age due to our upbringing and our genes.
#6: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY
The final sales personality trait that leads to success that we will cover in this video, is the personality trait of being accountable.
Personal accountability is important because you need to be accountable to yourself before other people will become accountable to you.
One of the ways we test personal accountability with our SalesCode assessment over salesman.org is by looking at the questions that our members ask themselves when things go wrong in their life.
People who have poor levels of personal accountability ask themselves questions that begin with “why”, “when”, or “who”.
High performers who have good levels of personal accountability ask themselves questions that begin with “what” or “how”.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say a competitor swoops in and steals your sale. You then miss out on a fat $10,000 of bonus commissions.
Would you ask yourself questions like –
- Why did they go with the competition?
- When will they learn that we are better?
- Who do we need to get rid of from the team?
Whilst these questions might be valid, they tend to show a lower level of personal accountability in the person asking them.
Someone who has higher levels of personal accountability are more likely to ask questions like –
- What did I do wrong?
- How can I stop this happening next time?
The next time something goes wrong in your life, pay attention to the questions that you ask yourself and you’ll learn how personally accountable for your actions you really are.
