(light music) - At the end of the day,
there are three categories of salespeople.
There are bottom performers who ultimately
are not going to make it.
Right, these are the people that should be doing other jobs.
They should not be in sales.
And then you have the middle performers
who are the majority of salespeople,
who are making a living,
but are not crushing it.
Right, they're doing okay,
but they're not super successful.
And then the third category are top performers,
top salespeople, and these folks are absolutely crushing it.
In fact, so often, in the work that we do,
we see that top-performing salespeople make more money
than the CEO of their company.
Top-performing salespeople are more valuable
to an organization than often the VP of sales.
Because what that top sales rep does
is brings in so much money to the organization.
So they have the ultimate job security,
and at the same time, they're making so much money.
And it's all because they're doing certain things
that ultimately lead them to being that top salesperson.
So in this video, I'm going to show you nine reasons
why top salespeople succeed.
Check it out.
(air whooshing)
Number one, lead gen is in the bag.
This is so key.
You cannot be a top-performing sales rep
without having a very clear strategy for lead generation.
You can't be struggling day-to-day thinking to yourself,
"How am I going to generate new leads?"
You have to know exactly what you're doing
to generate those leads.
So some of those leads may be self-generated
where you're literally making cold calls,
or you're asking for introductions,
or you have a team of people who are making cold calls
on your behalf and generating those leads.
Maybe you're using cold email.
Whatever it is, all top-performing reps
always have lead gen all figured out.
So in order to become like those top sales reps,
you need to figure out this lead gen piece.
I have a ton of other videos on this,
but you need to absolutely figure that out
because you can't be struggling day-to-day
with generating new leads.
If you are, you will always be in that middle tier
of kind of core reps.
Number two, execute every day.
I see so often that top-performing reps are very consistent.
They're very disciplined.
That doesn't mean that they're working way harder
than all of the other sales reps out there.
In fact, oftentimes they work fewer hours.
But they are incredibly disciplined about executing
the plan every single day.
So maybe they have to call a certain number
of clients every day.
Maybe they have to close a certain number of sales.
Whatever it is, they're executing every day.
Often, you see a lot of reps in the middle and at the bottom
who are kind of all over the place.
They wake up one day and they're like,
"Ah, I'm not in the mood to make a call today,
"and so I'm just gonna kind of do office work today."
Or another day, they get a burst of motivation,
so then they do stuff.
And then the next day, they go back to hiding in operations
and just servicing customers.
So they're all over the place.
Whereas, top salespeople are consistently executing
every single day, whether they want to or not,
they're getting the plan done.
Number three, they don't look for friends.
We don't need friends in sales.
If you are a top-performing sales rep,
you absolutely are not
going to need friends in sales.
Now of course you've gonna have friends
(laughing) in your real life, of course.
But what we see is that the myth
of the relationship builder,
and this has been dispelled over and over and over again,
where for many years, people thought that often
top-performing reps were the best relationship builders.
They had the best relationships in the business.
They were the best schmoozers.
They could walk into a room of people
and they could make sure that every single person loved them
at the end of the conversation.
But the reality is that top-performing reps
don't need to look for friends in sales.
What they're focused on is closing business.
They're focused on establishing authority,
determining whether someone's a fit, and closing deals.
And if a person turns out to not be a fit,
they don't think twice about it.
We can't be looking for friends.
We can't be looking for approval from our prospects
or even from our clients, for that matter.
Now there's nothing wrong with developing
a personal relationship with a client.
That's fine.
But we don't want to be developing
deeply personal relationships with prospects.
We just want to focus on making sure
that they're going to be a fit, providing value,
and then closing business.
And if there's a little bit of bonding and rapport
in the process and understanding their kids and all that,
that's fine, but that's not the focus,
and it doesn't really matter in the long run
whether we consider them a friend or not.
Number four, establish authority.
Top salespeople are authorities, are experts.
And it doesn't mean that you need 25 years of experience
in your given field.
But rather, they're focused on understanding
the entire marketplace, where their prospects exist.
And so as a salesperson,
you can so often have such an amazing bird's-eye view
of what's happening in the lives of your customers
and your prospects.
And sharing that expertise
and knowledge establishes authority.
So what you want to start do to establish authority is,
it's not about your product or your service,
but instead it's about what's going on in the world
of your prospects.
And sharing some of those best practices
and what you're seeing others dealing with,
and that starts to show your authority
and that you understand their world.
Number five, assertive, not aggressive.
This is so key.
Top salespeople are very assertive,
but just to the point of being not aggressive.
We see often middle-performing reps are afraid
to be assertive.
They so often are kind of timid,
and that's problematic.
We need to be assertive.
We need to be willing to challenge a prospect
when they do something that's not either
in their best interest or in our best interest.
But we don't want to get to the point of being aggressive.
Because that's the other type of middle-performing rep
where they're too aggressive,
and then it comes off as a turn-off.
So we want to dance that delicate line
of being assertive, being willing to lead prospects
down a path, to ask those hard questions,
to say those things that need to be said,
but not to the point of ultimately being aggressive.
Number six, disqualify.
I say this so often, but top salespeople are so good
at disqualifying opportunities that are not a fit.
They're going into every single conversation
with a prospect and saying to themself,
"Is this ultimately a fit?"
And if it's not a fit, they move on.
And if it is a fit, then they start to dig deeper
to determine that it is really a fit.
So they're asking questions in such a way
that as soon as a prospect says something
that makes it really clear that it's not going to be a fit,
they dig into that, and if it still turns out
not to be a fit,
they move on and they never think about it again.
But if the prospect is a fit,
now they have determined so much.
They've gotten so much insight and so much info,
and they have so many tools in their arsenal to make sure
that now what they're presenting to the prospect
is exactly solving the challenges that the prospect
has already mentioned.
Number seven, N.S.O.
Next-step obsessed.
When I say this, I just wanna put this in context.
I believe and we see from the data
that the best salespeople, the top salespeople,
are obsessed with establishing next steps
in every single stage of the sale.
They are willing to push for that next meeting.
They're always trying to get that next piece scheduled
so that way sales don't fall apart.
Have you ever been in a selling situation
where the sale just, it seemed like it was going well
and then it just kinda fizzled out?
This is what next step obsession helps with.
Now I don't mean obsession in like a weird way
where you're just like stalking them,
but instead at the end of every single interaction
with a prospect, you're always scheduling that next step.
And you're sending out that calendar invite,
and by the way, if the prospect is unwilling
to schedule a next step in that meeting,
then chances are there's something that has gone wrong.
You want to be totally committed to always establishing
that next step, being assertive about it,
not aggressive, but assertive.
Number eight, it's a game.
Selling is a game.
Selling is like a game of tennis.
Sometimes the ball lands in the way that you were hoping.
Other times it doesn't.
It's not a big deal.
If you lose a point, you lose a point.
And that's what a sale is.
It's not the whole game.
It's just a point here and there.
You've got to have that mindset like all
of the best salespeople that,
"Hey, you know what, sometimes a sale goes well,
"sometimes it doesn't."
The most competitive people are great salespeople,
but they have to be competitive in the right way,
not competitive in like a sore sport kind of,
they throw their tennis racket when the game
doesn't go in their way.
But instead that they just want to win.
They love the game.
They're willing to do whatever it takes
to get that game to go in the direction they want.
But you know what, sometimes it doesn't,
and they don't go home and pout.
It's all about just enjoying that game.
And that's number nine, enjoy it.
We need to enjoy the process of selling.
You know what, so many of the top salespeople
just enjoy selling.
Whenever I talk to them, I get a really amazing
birds's-eye view of top salespeople,
and one thing that you notice about top salespeople
is that they legitimately enjoy what they're doing.
They're having fun.
They're not angry when a prospect disappears.
They just wanna understand why.
They're not angry when they don't lose a sale.
They just, you know, they may be bummed out in the moment,
but they know it's part of the process
and they enjoy the process.
They enjoy generating leads.
They enjoy closing deals.
They enjoy onboarding people.
They enjoy getting referrals to other people.
They enjoy the whole process.
And the more you can enjoy the process
and not just the outcome of the sale
and the money it generates for you,
but just actually enjoying the whole process,
the more successful you will be.
(light music) So there are
the nine reasons why top salespeople succeed.
And if you enjoyed this video,
then I have an awesome free training
on the data-driven approach to help you crush
your sales goals.
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