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 spoke with a company today who is in the process of providing training to their sales team.  Margins have been shrinking in this industry for years due the commoditization of the product and increased competition. This trend was exacerbated by the recession and many sales reps have seen their incomes drop anywhere from 30% to 50% in the last few years.   The management team decided to spend a bundle on training to help the sales team learn to position their products as value generation tools and not commodities. During the first weekly session one of the reps opted out of the rest of the training.

Management in relaying the story to me wasn’t surprised. They didn't want to expend resources on a person who wasn't receptive so they were glad to see him go. Leave the training I mean, not the company. The rep is on 100% commission so he is sleeping in the bed he made for himself. However, let’s examine this further.  Why isn’t he worried about his dwindling income? Why isn’t he afraid of losing his position?  Why isn’t he afraid of trying to find another job in the midst of record unemployment?
Why isn't his company worried about how this attitude will manifest itself with customers and other employees? What's the value of the lost opportunities he will fail to develop as he continues instead to sell the old fashion way by quoting and hoping?

Even if he didn’t plan to learn anything, why wasn’t it easier to just go with the flow? He certainly could have sat there during each session, feigning interest and day dreaming about his next yard project as millions of sales reps have done before him. Had he chosen this more frequented path, he would not have called attention to himself and at least maintained the illusion of a team player, a committed employee. He might have actually learned something too, albeit by accident. But he chose to renounce the training rather than participate apparently without fear of reprisal.
Is this just total disregard for his employer, his job, his family, himself? Or is this what happens when there are no conditions of employment?

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.