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.

I’m actually a nice person. Many people don’t know this about me. They think I’m a hard ass because I work really hard, am focused and actually care about whether they have a job next year. I push them hard to learn what they need to learn. I ask them hard questions and most of them just don’t like it. 

The world is changing rapidly. What marketers did for the last 50 years is not what they will do in the next 50. What sales people did for the last 50 years will definitely not be what they do in the next 50. Not even the next two years! What business owners and senior executives should be doing today, is vastly different from what was done even a generation ago.  

So let’s get down to business. My philosophy as a sales coach or as a marketing partner is pretty much the same one I have for being a friend. Anybody can tell you what you want to hear, what makes you feel good, what doesn’t challenge you to be better. Real friends tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. Good sales people don’t just do what you ask, they try to figure out what you need, even if both of you aren’t sure what that is. And marketing partners should try to keep you from becoming complacent, from doing what you’ve always done or what others have always done, just because they’ve always done it (or for any other nonsensical reason).

I’ve been in the business world now for 30 years. During that time I’ve watched really good companies, full of really good people go out of business. I’ve seen sales reps bounce from position to position because frankly, no one has the guts to tell them that they don’t have what it takes. And I’ve watched companies spend unbelievable amounts of money on marketing that doesn’t work because that was easier than trying new things that might actually work. So basically, when I’m not nice – it’s because I see you getting dangerously close to those outcomes.

During this past week, I lost an opportunity partly because I had been trained how to sell at Xerox in the early 80s.

This opportunity included integrating their marketing strategy and execution with their sales process. To net this out, our plan included using PR, direct mail, email and social media to create awareness and uncover interested prospects. We would start by building a predictive model from their existing customer information and use that model to target the right people with relevant information and offers. To respond to the offer, the prospect would be asked to visit a landing page where we could measure what they were clicking on and actually ask them some questions, if they were game. Based on their activity, the interest could be scored, and folks exhibiting behaviors indicating a higher interest level would be prioritized and sent on to the sales force. The sales force would be trained in advance with an opening statement reflective of the prospect’s interest, some non-threatening talking points and a relevant offer to allow the prospect to investigate further. The verbal conversation would be reinforced by an email or direct mail with the same offer depending on the prospect’s preferences for communication.

I hear through the grapevine that one of the people on the committee thought this would be too pushy based on my Xerox experience. I learned a lot at Xerox but here it is in a nutshell: 

A study by the ES Research Group notes that 30% of sales people are not suited for their jobs. That bears repeating. 30% of sales people are not suited for their jobs. Why? Because they lack critical behavioral traits such as self-motivation, intelligence, persuasiveness, resilience and curiosity.  These personality traits, which correlate closely with sales ability, occur in only 20% of the population according to Geoffrey James of the Sales Machine. 

 

So let’s net this out. Professional selling requires characteristics that most people do not possess and a whole lot of people who call themselves sales reps don’t have these characteristics. This is why 4% of the country's salespeople sell 94% of the goods and services.* 

 

A professional sales person is like a thoroughbred racehorse. They don’t pull plows even though they technically can. So why do so many organizations create job descriptions that have their racehorses in charge of company marketing or submitting estimate requests or managing other sales people or cajoling technical resources to do their jobs? Sure, sales people can do these things, but so can a lot of other people who can’t sell.