Why I Started Differential Selling

This article and the subsequent "Seller Quality Deep-Dives" were published last year on my website. I'm re-publishing them on LinkedIn to streamline my website and make this content more accessible. If you've read this before, I invite you to revisit it. The Seller Qualities Model continues to be as relevant today as it was 2 years ago. If you're new-- welcome! This is why I left a role as a strategic seller and started a business to coach individual sellers.

The Seller Quality Deep-Dives will be published here over the next few weeks.

I want to share something with you.

I think we’ve been getting it wrong.

I think the things we’ve been taught to look for in Enterprise Sellers don’t actually correlate with future performance.

I think the things to which we attribute our past success may actually hinder us today.

I think our customers are changing faster than we are.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. It drove me to start Differential Selling.

Houston, We Have a Problem

I started my career in Houston, Texas selling IMS and DB2 Mainframe Utilities at a small software company. It was a helluva way to start a career in software sales, but what the job lacked in buzz, excitement, and culture, it more than made up for in deep immersion with Fortune 500 customers and a crack team of veteran selling heavyweights. As I dove into the task of patterning myself after the most successful people around me, I was stunned to discover how difficult it was to discern what, exactly, made people successful in these highly complex, high-stakes sales positions.

I noted that two very different individuals with vastly different personalities, temperaments, styles, and (frankly) work ethics shared almost nothing in common… except for the fact that they were both wildly successful. For a kid 3 weeks out of college, watching someone collect a commission check worth more than all of my student loans combined was a great motivator, but I couldn’t determine what I should try to emulate with two vastly different samples.

This conundrum only became more enigmatic as my experience and network grew. There seemed to be as many varieties of successful Seller personalities and styles as there were sellers, and coupled with the plethora of other variables that impact success for Enterprise Sellers (territory, accounts, timing, offering, etc.), it was almost impossible to predict with any certainty who would succeed and who would struggle. And so, like so many of us when faced with a puzzle, we rely on the next best thing: trailing indicators of success.

Trailing Indicators

Trailing indicators are the natural result of success in the past. They are, many times, decent enough predictors of future success. Think about that mutual fund in your 401(k). The projections about your return at retirement are based on past performance. With 100+ years of stock market data and a long enough time horizon, these predictions can be pretty accurate… except when things change.

When the playing field changes, we end up learning ahard lesson about the difference between correlation and causation. The things that coexisted with success in the past won’t necessarily coexist with it in the future, and we can get a nasty surprise. This is why the SEC requires all of those projections in your portfolio to include the same fine print: “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” 2008 comes to mind.

We are vulnerable to similar unpleasant surprises when we hire, train, and develop Enterprise Sellers based on trailing indicators. What are some common trailing indicators of success that we tend to try to find or foster in our Enterprise Sellers?

• Track record of hitting quota
• Long tenure at a single company
• Connections with VIPs in a territory or account
• Expertise in a specific domain or industry
• X years of experience

These trailing indicators may have correlated with success in the past-- they are, in most cases, the direct result of past success. They may have even been decent predictors of future success for a time. But they will leave us exposed to a surprising lack of success when the world changes.

The World is Changing

“The World is changing” might be the understatement of the decade, but I’m talking about far more than the effects of the pandemic on B2B relationships. There has been a shift happening in the world of Enterprise Sales for a long time. The effect of the pandemic seems only to have accelerated it. I’ll save my observations on how the world is changing for another post. For our purposes here, the how is less important than the effect, and the effect is that trailing indicators are no longer strong predictors of future performance in Enterprise salespeople. Have you noticed how much harder it is to find strong performers?

Consider this. Since starting Differential Selling, client after client has shared a common struggle with me: how to hire, train, and understand what makes the best Enterprise Sellers the best. The success of the business depends on the ability of leadership to identify, recruit, and retain top performers in each area of expertise, but this task seems to be uniquely challenging for our Enterprise Sales teams. Here’s an example I heard recently from a frustrated Sales VP:

“I don’t get it. The guy had an amazing resume-- a track record of repeatedly hitting quota at other companies. He sailed through our interview process, everybody loved him, and we hired him thinking he would be one of our top performers. But after watching him in action, I don’t think he really knows how to sell.”

Does this resonate? Have you heard this before? Maybe you’ve experienced it first hand. Now think about how ridiculous it would be to hear the head of a development team say the same thing: “It’s weird, he’s got a great resume, but it turns out he doesn’t really know how to code!” If we heard this about a new-hire in a technical position, we would accurately diagnose the problem as a failure of the interview process. Said simply, it was a failed evaluation of correct criteria. But this is not the same thing that is happening in our struggle to find, train, and develop top Enterprise sellers. The difficulty is too widespread-- we don’t have that many bad interviewers. Instead, I believe that as the world of Enterprise Sales has changed, our reliance on trailing indicators of success has left us looking for the wrong things. Said simply, our difficulty arises from a successful evaluation of incorrect criteria.

The impact to recruiting is significant. We spend a premium hiring salespeople who possess trailing indicators with no real certainty that they will be successful. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. Perhaps worse, we miss potential superstars whose only limitation is lacking the very trailing indicators that we’ve already established do not guarantee future success.

Training Day

And this problem is bigger than just recruiting. If we incorrectly believe that trailing indicators are what’s needed to succeed in the future, our efforts in onboarding, enablement, and evaluation will be ineffective at best and detrimental at worst. This, by the way, is the worst kept secret in sales. It’s the reason why it feels like pulling teeth to get your top performers to join the latest required training session. Top performing Enterprise Sellers are notoriously stingy with their time, only making room for things that will directly impact their ability to close business. If your monthly mandatory training sessions lack attendance and your latest SFDC integration has lagging adoption, let’s consider just for a minute that it may be because those things are distractions from, not enablers for, closing more deals. What we are left with is a part of the team finding reasons to ignore our enablement efforts, the other part being trained toward skills that will not help them be more successful.

Guardrails

This all begs an important question: what then, are the leading indicators of success? I’m so glad you asked. First, some guardrails.

1. The indicators will have to be fundamental; things that can show up in a person regardless of experience, personality, or style. We want a diverse group of people on our teams, and we don’t want to miss rising stars who have not had a chance to prove themselves yet. What do they have in common that leads to success?
2. The indicators will have to be a mix of how a person thinks and how a person acts. Interpersonal communication is a blend of disposition, perception, and action.
3. The indicators will be things that an individual can learn, improve, and grow. Everyone has different talents, and some are born with certain advantages, but no one is born with everything they need to be a top Enterprise Seller. Each of these indicators should be coachable, and therefore, present in varying degrees in each person.
4. Finally, the indicators will have to be deep enough to encompass the full breadth of what leads to success in modern Enterprise Sales but simple enough to be useful for assessment, training, and recruiting.

Seller Qualities as Leading Indicators

Differential Selling was founded on the principle that today’s top performing Enterprise Sellers share common Seller Qualities that are essential for consistent and pervasive success when selling sophisticated technical solutions to complex Enterprises. Selling at the Enterprise level is more than just closing high-dollar transactions. A true Enterprise sale is only achieved when a solution is proven transformational to the purchasing company, and its evaluation has endured scrutiny across multiple decision organizations in the customer account. Though successful Enterprise sellers may have diverse personalities, experience, and styles, the demands of today's Enterprise selling motion requires certain common qualities across all Enterprise salespeople. These qualities are leading indicators of success.

I offer the following eight (8) qualities and their definitions that I believe embody the kind of Enterprise Seller that will be overwhelmingly and repeatedly successful in any complex, high-stakes B2B sales situation. You will notice these qualities fall on a spectrum with qualities pertaining to Seller Mindset on one end and Seller Behavior at the other.

• BELIEF: An authentic motivation driven from faith in something larger than self. This quality is most crucially and commonly observed in belief in the company; namely, that the AE believes that the company is strong, it is led by competent, good people, and that the offerings of the company are truly the best path to success for their customers. Belief is also evident in the path of an AE’s career. When an AE’s greatest motivation is their own success (either praise or money), they lack the “Belief” that we define here, and customers will detect it.
• HUMILITY: An awareness of and comfort with one’s own weaknesses, gaps, or challenges. Humility describes not a person who thinks lowly of themselves, but rather one who exhibits excellent self-knowledge and self-awareness.? They not only know their weaknesses, they have a comfort with them that leads to asking for help, proactively anticipating gaps, and accepting influence. This kind of humility is absolutely critical in achieving the authenticity and trust required by today’s enterprise customers for? long-term relationships.
• OWNERSHIP: The eager embracing of responsibility and accountability for all outcomes within one’s sphere of influence.? An AE exhibits Ownership when they completely embody their role as both company-representative to the customer, and customer-representative to the company. Ownership is evident in AEs who are quick to take responsibility and slow to take credit. They completely tie their own personal success or failure to that of the customers they represent.? They believe that, in spite of all other variables, the ultimate determining factor in their success is themselves.
• PERSEVERANCE: Resilience and composure when circumstances unexpectedly change.? The AE with Perseverance has a tempering effect on both their customers and their organization because they stay the course even when unexpected difficulties occur.? A strong indicator of Perseverance is an AE who has been in a selling role at a single organization for more than 2 years.? Because long tenure brings so many unique benefits to an Enterprise AE, Perseverance is critical.
• TRUST BUILDING: An ethic of exhibiting consistent and predictable behavior over time.? Not to be confused with a personality trait like charisma, Trust Building requires constant and uncommon transparency, coupled with the practice of delivering on promises.? This pattern of behavior creates a consistency upon which a customer can truly rely.
• PROCESS MASTERY: An obvious expertise and adeptness at a personal selling process.? Process Mastery is made up of the skills that are typically associated with selling (prospecting, qualifying, closing, etc.), but requires a cohesive embracing of and comfort with the process from end-to-end.? This means it is personalized, deeply understood, and ever-ready.? In addition, it must include the knowledge and relationships of internal processes so the AE can deliver for their customer.? The AE who has Process Mastery always knows the next step but can also adapt when needed.
• VALUE CRAFTING: The consistent act of discovering, exploring, educating, and building value that is others-centered.? Value Crafting includes traditional skills like building justification for a deal, but it more broadly encompasses an AE’s ability to grow assumed value and find new value that the customer has not considered on their own.? Critically, the AE who is strong at Value Crafting is also obsessed with delivering value, and loves to educate others (both their customer and their own organization) of the value their customer expects or has achieved.
• STORYTELLING: The art of sharing metrics, value, and technical information through compelling and natural narratives.? Storytelling is the cornerstone behavior of the modern Enterprise Seller because a well-crafted and well-delivered story exposes Value, traces the path of the selling Process, builds Trust, requires Ownership, and exudes Belief.? The Storytelling AE relishes any chance to share simple, direct, and true narratives of customer experiences including the customer’s challenges before their interaction, the cost of allowing those challenges to persist, specific metrics of the? required solution, and the vision achieved through realized business value.

These Seller Qualities are the basis of my business. They are the rubric I use for evaluating and coaching individuals. They are the focus areas for my Team Workshops. They are the lens I apply when considering challenges and obstacles that selling organizations share with me, and they inform my recommendations on how to address them.

As I engage with clients, I will continue to refine and iterate upon this list. This is likely the first version of many. You may be reading this and thinking about other qualities that are more fundamental, relevant, or important. I would love your feedback!

But after a number of customer engagements with both large and small companies in a variety of different industries, I’ve found this list of qualities to be extremely effective. Most valuable is the way it elevates the conversation beyond the reactive, tactical orientation we so often take in the high speed world of high-growth tech companies. It allows my clients and me to be more methodical, more thoughtful, and move beyond the what of the situation to the motivations and drivers behind it, impacting real change in the individuals and teams on the front lines.

What’s Next?

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to start a series of posts devoted to each one of these qualities, deep-diving into what it is, how it presents itself, and ways to foster it in yourself and your teams. I’d love for you to read along and share your feedback. Drop me a line on LinkedIn or ping me for a call.