Hey guys, this is Steli Efti with Close.io. Let's explore what the differences between somebody
who's good at sales and somebody that is great at sales.
I was just chatting earlier today with an entrepreneur, an author, a startup person, and we're chit-
chatting about traction and growth hacking and sales and startups, and at some point he asked
me, "You know what, Steli? What's the difference between a good sales person and a great sales
person?" I thought that that's an excellent question, something that I wanted to discuss.
I know that most people will think that's obvious, right? Great sales people are a lot more
charismatic, more outgoing. Great sales people are the ones that come up with these great ideas
and hacks, and close these massive deals in some really sexy way. But, nothing could be further
from the truth. The difference between good sales people and great sales people is consistency.
Yep, boring old consistency, because consistency is king in sales, and I'll tell you why. A lot of
the things that make people good at sales, you can actually learn. You can learn to be
compassionate, be somebody that understands human psychology, that cares about other people,
that learns to ask questions and be an active listener. You can learn to show up and be proactive in
your communication, and write good emails, and make good phone calls, and shop and make
good presentations. All of that can be learned and studied. You can learn to actually be confident
in your solution, be precise in your pitching, and to be great at following up and following
through. You can learn these things. You can learn really good sales basics and practice these.
And then, one thing that's a little more challenging, but that still people can learn and overcome is
their ability to manage rejection and deal with rejection. Something that good sales people really
need to handle and master is the ability to approach things that are risky, where somebody's
going to tell you no and actually deal with that, both logically and rationally, but also
emotionally. And then, keep on going on and keep pitching, although you just got rejected.
All of these things and a lot, lot more can all be learned. Yes, some people have more talent, more
nature, and some people are more trained and had to be more nurtures. And when you take
nature and nurture and you get both together at the highest level, you get really great
performance. But, even if you are not that talented, you can learn everything there is to know to
be good at sales.
Why do you have to consistent to be great at sales? I'll tell you why, because sales at it's core is
just like high performance sports. Let's think about athletes. I bring this example up a lot. Think
about people like Michael Jordan at his prime. Michael Jordan had both nature and nurture, right?
An amazing athlete, even at his prime, at the best of the best of his time, when he would go on
the field and a new game started, and the time clock started, the score read zero on both sides.
Nobody said, well, that's Michael Jordan. He worked his ass off over the last four years. He's
done all these amazing things, performed all these miracles on the field. He surely should start
off with an advantage of 30 brownie points or something. No! It doesn't matter how good your
results were, it doesn't matter what you've done yesterday at the last game, at the last pitch, at
the last meeting, you have to show up every single day in sales and perform. Every single day,
and that's the single biggest sales challenge for most sales people, most people doing sales. And
that, my friends, is what separates good sales people from great sales people.
Can you actually perform every day like it's your first day? Can you show up like it's your first
day? Can you go into every sales call, every sales email, every sales meeting and sales
presentation, every pitch, every negotiation, as if you life depends on it? Can you perform at the
highest level every single time? And can you do so- no matter if you have good days or bad days,
no matter if you feel like it or if you don't feel like it, no matter if you had too much success and
you've been riding on this wave and everything has been going great? Can you still do it after
five years? Seven? Ten years? That is what separates good from great sales people. That's what
makes people masters in their craft. It's consistency. Nothing else.