How to develop your sales talent.....

Reading Time - 8 mins....it's a long one.

My clients are always asking “how do we go about achieving high performance in our sales department?”

That question nearly always leads to a discussion about talent, culture, team composition and performance management, and it is always an interesting discussion – especially because of the common misconceptions that surround what now constitutes 'sales talent'. Senior leaders nearly always say to me that “we don’t have the right people”, whilst the sales people will blame ‘culture’ and ‘poor leadership’ for the increasing sales under-performance.

But lets back up a step and examine some fundamentals about B2B sales talent. Throughout my career I have witnessed certain individuals being labelled as A-Grade talent when they were never worthy of that label. Oftentimes, they just happened to be in the right place at the right time….emerging growth market, right product, in the right territory, with the right set of accounts, and hey presto – A-grade Rockstar!

Then said Rockstar goes somewhere else (next role) and often fails miserably. The key lesson here is that categorising sales ‘talent’ is often a futile exercise in my experience, especially if you’re basing these assessments on good old quota/revenue attainment over a short period of time. Anyone that was in sales at Cisco in the mid-late 1990’s was smashing their number (Rockstar’s). Anyone working in sales at VMWare or SAP when virtualisation and ERP first emerged was a Rockstar, and the list goes on.

Needless to say that the identifiable traits of a successful sales person today are the opposite of the old school lone-wolf quota crushers of the 20th century, and I have written about this extensively in my book. In the customer-led era, the fundamental traits that I now look for in sales talent centre around critical thinking, problem solving, EQ (people skills) and most importantly. ‘coach-ability’. I could care less about charisma, presence or the ‘little black book’ of contacts that the Rockstars ‘claim’ they possess.

Traits aside, as the role of the B2B sales person continues to radically evolve, the great performers are now more valuable than ever but where does great sales performance come from and how can we cultivate it? 

I just finished reading an outstanding book on this very topic and I wanted to share the key lessons. Talent is Overrated is a book written by Geoff Colvin which examines (in detail) the age-old debate on whether we are born with ‘talent’ or if it is simply the result of hard work.

Colvin states that many studies, over long periods of time, have shown that natural talent (regardless of the endeavour) means nothing if that talent is not developed. The successful sports people, musicians, academics and business people all have one critical ingredient in common, and that is their approach to “deliberate practice”. Not just hard work, but ‘deliberate practice’. Plenty of people work hard and never achieve anything remotely resembling high performance. 

Colvin also cites the 10 year rule, which reminds me of what Malcolm Gladwell stated in his fabulous book (Outliers) about 10,000 hours to mastery. Even the most naturally gifted among us must spend a certain amount of time (10 years or 10k hours) plying their trade in order to reach the lofty heights of high performance or perfection, and often that 10-year journey begins at a early age and is supported by a great teacher/coach/parent – think Tiger Wood and his father Earl. Put simply, the path to high performance is nearly always underpinned by lots of deliberate practice.

How many sales people can claim that they do ANY ‘deliberate practice? Answer: virtually none in my experience and that’s mainly because they are NOT encouraged to do so and it’s definitely not mandated. Imagine what would happen if deliberate practice was mandated as a part of the daily sales responsibilities. 

Activities influence outcomes and yet we only focus on outcomes. Why?

I’m constantly banging on (with my clients) about sales activity breakdown and it nearly always resembles something like the recent Pace Productivity study. 22% selling time amid a whole lot of Low Value Activities (LVA’s) which is just absurd. Seriously, how can anyone possibly expect high performance with so many LVA’s and so few high value activities (HVA’s)?

Low Value Activity always equals Low Value Output

Lets assume (and humour me here) that the sales leader made it compulsory for every sales person to spend the first 30 minutes of every day proactively practising a small subset of the important competencies that are now required in order to improve sales performance.

That 2.5 hours per week would soon begin to translate in to 30 hours of deliberate practice in Q1 and circa 100-120 hours in Y1– can you imagine how much better each sales person would perform at the end of Y1? This is exactly the discipline that high performance teams take – incremental improvements over time. 

The other factor that Colvin highlighted in his brilliant book was that high performers have ALWAYS developed a deep mental model in their chosen field, meaning that they have taken a very deliberate approach to developing deep domain knowledge in every aspect of their profession.

Every hour spent on domain knowledge enhancement is another hour ahead of your competitors, all of whom are also doing zero deliberate practice. Imagine how your sales performance would improve if all of your sales people took deliberate practice seriously. Moreover, specialised domain knowledge would be dramatically improve and this is undoubtedly the fastest path to trusted advisor status with your buyers.

The 3 major points of this great book (for me) were:

The importance of Deliberate Practice – I don’t know a single vendor business that allocates any time to anything that resembles practice for sales people. How ridiculous in hindsight – many of the sales competencies have always been difficult – presenting, pitching, public speaking, proposal writing, and yet we never practice any of it. WTF?

Deliberate practice over time (The 10-year journey to Mastery) – businesses always fail to take a long-term view to developing sales people into the high performing Rockstar’s that they so desperately seek. Instead they search constantly for the ready-made Rockstar’s whilst the Rockstar’s they need in 2019 are probably already inside their business.

Deep domain knowledge – imagine if vendor businesses actually made the attainment of domain knowledge a daily/weekly KPI. Imagine if sales leaders actually put programs in place to teach their sales people how to become specialists.

As previously stated, most sales departments completely ignore these foundational aspects of high performance, and it’s therefore unsurprising that we now have so many sales people failing (63%) and sales staff attrition is so high (30-40% in most industries).

We all have to stop thinking that we can generate high performance without the necessary changes to sales activities, skills and competencies. Deliberate practice is really the only path to sustained sales performance improvement and this is more important now than ever before.

The good news is that great sales performance is no longer reserved for the preordained few - the charismatic Rockstar’s of yesteryear are no longer relevant, because today's empowered buyers want specialists that can teach them, and we can ALL improve with the right focus on the activities that actually matter.

Does you sales leader allow or encourage you to spend time practising?

How much time each week does your company spend on enhancing your domain knowledge?

Are you just relying on natural talent?....because it’s proven that deliberate practice will beat your talent sooner of later.

By Graham Hawkins

About the Author

With 30 years of experience, Graham Hawkins is an award winning B2B sales specialist with a contemporary view on how ‘sales’ must now align to the new customer-led era. Graham was a LinkedIn Top Voice 2018 award winner and he has recently authored two books on B2B sales – the most recent being ‘The Future of the Sales Profession, which is now an Amazon International Best Seller.

Graham is also the Founder & CEO of SalesTribe, and he can be contacted by emailing ‘[email protected]’

www.salestribe.com