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.