If you read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, being really great at something comes down to how many hours you get to spend doing it.  Bill Gates, through almost happenstance, got to spend a lot of hours programming a mainframe computer when he was a young man at a time when most people had never seen one. The rest, as they say, is history.

My son spent a lot of time playing baseball as a kid. His teams won four state AAU baseball titles, finished 8th and 2nd in the USA in the AAU Nationals, came in third in the Cal Ripken World Series and played for the State High School Championship multiple times. He played every inning of every game.  The difference between a major leaguer and a lot of athletes may not be talent but rather innings played while they were growing up and in college. Lots of time spent doing something often leads to success doing it.

So let’s talk sales. Does the same principle apply? If you spend a lot of time talking to senior execs, chances are you will get good at it.  The more times you interact with them – asking good questions and listening to the answers - the more times you will find problems you can solve, the more times you will present solutions, the more times you will negotiate a sale and the more times you will win.

For Bill Gates and my son, love of computers and baseball made it easy for them to spend lots of time working at their craft.  For people who truly love selling, it’s not hard to put in the hours required to get good at it. 

Unfortunately though, there are a lot of people selling who really shouldn’t be doing it. They just don’t like it! They don’t want to talk to decision makers, they don’t want to spend the time learning about their challenges or trying to figure out how to solve them. They avoid the chances to do so by busying themselves with non-productive tasks. They don’t spend enough time perfecting their craft. Not enough hours spent leads to not enough success. In fact, just 4% of the nation’s sales people sell 96% of the goods and services.  It’s pretty easy to see who put the time in.

So here’s the magic formula to sales success: Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect. Lots of Perfect Practice Makes Perfect. Loving the fact that you can solve people’s problems, loving the process of moving the decision from one step to the next, loving figuring it all out, makes it easier to do a lot of the things necessary to be a good salesperson. But the reality of it is, like Bill Gates and my son, loving it isn’t enough, you have to DO a lot of it too.