As the sales landscape shifts to accommodate new technologies and trends, organizations are rewriting the definition of top performers. Where gregarious charm and mastery of persuasion once swayed revenue attainment, a new crop of sales reps has risen to the top of their trade, and they don’t act as their forebears did.
To accommodate an increasingly digital profession, modern sales reps have learned to use technology to their advantage–lest technology oust them from their jobs. They’ve learned that empathy will get them past gatekeepers much faster than smooth talk and a shower of compliments. They know that they compete with not just the top dog at another large company–but literally thousands of sales reps just like them–to reach decision makers that are increasingly weary of sales calls and marketing emails.
Craig Rosenberg, Founder of Funnelholic Media and Topo, identified six traits that define today’s most successful sales reps based on fifteen year’s worth of observations from within the industry:
- They are incredibly efficient. Sales people want every possible minute they have to be spent on selling. Paperwork, lookups and other processes that prevent sales from selling are not welcome.
- They crave independence. Salespeople ask for things all the time but they would rather not have to ask. Actually, salespeople would prefer if the organization would give them the tools they need so they can be like entrepreneurs and run their territories like individual businesses.
- They love to fish where the fish are biting. Sales people need prospects. When they find that “fishing spot,” or a list or batch of prospects that seem to work better than another, they will fish till there are no fish left.
- They thrive on motivation (and they perform poorly when frustrated). A frustrated salesperson will not perform. This is a fact.
- They need to constantly fill their pipelines. You might also say: “They always need prospects.” Filling one’s pipeline is a never-ending battle for sales people.
- They are numbers driven. The job of salespeople is to hit their numbers. The job of the people assigned to help them is to help them hit their numbers. You would be surprised how many organizations add tasks to salespeople’s plates that aren’t revenue driving.
What do the sales reps that display those traits expect from a modern sales world equipped with endless technologies to enable them, inundated with competitors, and driven by complex data?
Today’s sales reps grew up taking notes on their laptops–not in their composition notebooks. As teenagers, they ordered Christmas presents online so they didn’t have to stand in line at the mall. They pay for cabs on their smart phones to avoid the hassle of pulling their credit cards out of their wallets. They put a lot of value on efficiency, and will only adopt a new technology or task if it makes their lives easier.
Everything is accessible online. Sales reps have a wealth of knowledge about their industry and their prospects literally at their fingertips, and they know how to use it. The sense of drive that sends a sales rep to crowdsource online prospect research or write a blog about his or her profession has always been apparent in top reps. Years ago, the best sales reps read the Wall Street Journal before coming into the office to find any snippets of information that might help them win deals. The best sales reps today spend a lot of time on social media. They’re the first to request premium LinkedIn accounts, and will pay out of pocket if the company won’t provide them. They don’t think Twitter is a waste of time; it’s a new resource for prospect insights. They don’t wait for their organizations to implement social selling strategies before they start using them.
I recently met a sales rep who scans Craigslist job boards to find out which organizations are growing. I’ve talked to another who used to build prospect lists entirely with Facebook search (before Graph Search even existed) because she realized that companies on Facebook were more likely to buy. Whenever her computer accidentally got turned off, she’d lose her entire list and have to rebuild it the next day. In neither of these cases did the reps have access to a CRM export feature so they could log their lead lists. Those two reps found their fishing spots: hiring and presence of a Facebook page. Their companies didn’t deliver leads that listed those criteria, so they spent hours finding their own leads just so they could fish in their spots. They won’t settle for what they consider mediocre. The best reps use whatever tools are available to help them find leads. They’ll take advantage of anything that helps them find leads, but won’t bother trying to adopt a tool to earn approval from management or align with company policy.
Because they know they lose their jobs when they can’t earn their quotas, anything that stands in the way of sales’ ability to achieve their quotas will send them packing. This includes unfavorable compensation overhaul, consistently poor lead quality, and misaligned management. Sales reps continuously leave sought-after positions at well-known companies with the most respected sales organizations for reasons their managers can’t fathom. At the same time, plenty of sales reps from defunct startups clamor to earn a spot within those same organizations. Frustrated sales reps don’t stick around because of organizational loyalty or guilt. If an organization doesn’t provide them with the tools, compensation, and management structure to succeed, they will move somewhere that does.
Sales is like a never-ending roller coaster. The most successful quarter is followed directly by a descent back to zero; the worst quarter followed by a clean slate. Pipeline management requires months of foresight. Sales reps always need more leads. The best reps don’t complain to marketing about a lamentably dry pipeline; they have subscriptions to big data tools that constantly stream leads to them. These are the reps that build prospect lists on Facebook and used Craigslist to find leads.
As the profession of sales evolves, perhaps its not the psychology of top sales reps that has shifted, but only the tools available to them. We can look to the behaviors of top performers to determine the most effective and efficient sales practices. Are your top performers the ones stuck calling closed businesses on outdated data lists, or are they ones using Facebook and Twitter find leads? How can your sales organization adapt to make their lives easier?
