Top Ten Keys to Sales Success

At the core, I am an educator. Ten years ago I calculated that by that time in my career, I had trained 8000 salespeople. I stopped counting, but for a while I kept conducting sessions. Then I stopped that too.

This does not mean I am no longer immersed in the world. Every single workday I talk about selling, think about the theories, mathematics, and pseudoscience of selling, and lead teams of designers and facilitators who are steeped in the sales training world. Fifteen years ago I wrote a book about selling. Although my views have changed a lot since then, I am still flattered each time I hear that the book got cracked open.

The interesting thing is that most of what I learned about selling comes from training salespeople rather than from time spent “carrying a bag”, as they say. When I sold, I used MY model, my methods; but when I was in front of groups of learners I learned about their models, their insights, and their objections to my contributions. To prepare for those sessions, I had to research content—no sense reinventing the wheel. I also had to learn about the world of my target audience and create content to meet their needs.

One thing I never would have guessed when I got started is that there are a lot of different types of selling (14, at my last count). And they are very different. Selling in a retail environment is very different from being a territory manager for a consumer packaged goods manufacturer. Selling a service to a large institution is profoundly different from carving out a bigger chunk of a category manager’s sphere of influence. Convincing doctors to write YOUR script might sound similar to getting an architect to specify your light fixtures, but, trust me, it’s different.

So, if one were to venture into a generic list of the 10 keys to sales success, one would have to make the list pretty high level in order to make it universally applicable. Yet, I think there are very specific things that all salespeople need to have going for them in order to be hugely successful. I’m going to have a go at such a list over the next ten posts. So, stay tuned.

Earth, the Guy

Even 30 thirty years ago in my university residence yearbook I wrote about how people should participate and observe at the same time. They would get the most out of residence life, I claimed, if they fully engaged in, and periodically kept an eye on, what they were up to.

It seems that I’ve always been into this meta-stuff -- like, how at one point in time you are just doing something, such as reading this post, and then at some later moment, such as now, you can attend to (put your attention on) the simple fact that you were/are doing it.

Feel that flip thing going on? Eating this chocolate, I am aware of eating this chocolate. Back and forth we go.

It reminds me of those optical illusions such as the diagram with the old hag and young lady, in which you see one or the other, but not both. I love the flip thing.

Anyway, back to the participate/observe advice. Apparently we humans only have the ability for two kinds of conscious experiences. The philosopher Sartre called them “pre-reflective consciousness” (as in when we participate or are engaged) and “reflective consciousness” (as in when we interpret, or have removed ourselves such that we are able to self reflect). Pretty basic, really.

Buddhists have their own version of it; they say the best way to spend your time is to direct all of your attention to what you are doing -- that the reflective piece is pretty much “nothing”.

Here’s the thing: When I, and Billie-Bob, and Lucille, and the rest of us write our little blog posts and our tweets and our little Facebook tales that tell what we’re up to and what we’re thinking about, when we put our thoughts out there in the instantaneous electronic medium, and when we read the instantaneous reflections of the global others, are we not engendering a global reflective consciousness -- such that there’s this pulsing, growing, global sense of self?

I think so. There could be a NEW being that results from its reflective thought. An “I think, therefore, I am” kind of thing. A “we is”, if you’ll forgive the syntax.

So . . . humanity swooshes into a galactic bar, and the bartender asks him, “New in town? What’ll you have?” “Just got here," he says. "Gimme somethin’ to take the edge off; it’s been a long, boring ride.”

Big and Fat

I can't tell you what leadership is.

I think about it all the time. I'm on a team that designs and delivers courses about it. My word, I've even published 2 books that deal with aspects of it. But, truth be told, I still don’t know what leadership really is. And, while I think we all sort of know what it is, I don't think anybody has ever put their finger on it.

Is leadership about going first? Sometimes the leader is simply the one in front of others, like firemen going down the dark basement stairs, all following some guy named Dirk who’s shining his flashlight one or two steps ahead. He’s “leading” the way.

This applies to being the fastest thinker too. I've often noticed in group discussion that the person who comes up with the first workable answer ends up being the de facto leader of a conversation. The others, almost by definition, “follow”, just because they're not the first out of the thinking gate.

I suppose the "going first" thing might also show up as being innovative or creative. The creator of sticky notes sure made 3M the leader in its field!

Being proactive instead of reactive could also be a manifestation of "going first". When you can regularly cut problems off at the pass, you're charting the course of leadership.

I think most of us would agree that the leader is the person with the vision, the one who "sees" the future or has some other exclusive understanding. After all, if the ruler of the universe spoke to Moses, then, well, let’s follow Moses for heaven’s sake; he seems to have made it to the “in crowd”.

Of course, there's the courage/confidence stuff. Great leaders might be fearful, but I believe they try not to let it show too much or they effectively "self manage".

And we can't leave out the mysterious "personal power" aspect of leadership. This can take many forms: intensity, charm, or charisma. Even humility, though it seems the opposite of what we usually think of as "high powered", can be a force in and of itself. Same goes for authenticity, integrity, and that weird balance of compassion and focused decisiveness.

The best leaders I know really seem to "own" the mission, if you know what I mean. They are engaged. I don't think you can show true leadership if you're only partly engaged.

On some days it’s clear to me that leadership is the ability to bring people along. That is, you can engage others by establishing commonality with them and then showing them a new way. That's leadership in day-to-day practice

So is there a basic recipe? Let's see what we've got here. There's this "out front" thing. A clear vision of a desirable future, or of how stuff works. Confidence. Some sort of personal power. Ownership. A certain ability to enrol others.

I am positive this list is incomplete. And it doesn't even touch some of the juiciest questions about leadership, such as: Are the best leaders born or made? How can one optimize one's leadership style? What's the role of the leader? What are the differences between leading, managing, coaching, mentoring, consulting, facilitating? What's inside a "vision"? What exactly IS charisma? Where does confidence come from?

It'll take a leader to lead the way on these things. A big, fat leader.