In this article I’m going to share a simple framework you can use to develop your sales team’s performance, regardless of what level of resources you have available. But before we look at what you (and they) need to do, I want to start by exploring what drives some salespeople to succeed where others fail.
Understanding the drivers of personal sales performance
The pyramid in the Greater Sales Blueprint above represents a member of your sales team, and all the aspects of them that drive their sales performance. Everything in the lower layers of the pyramid underpins and helps to shape everything in the layers above, all the way up to the behaviours and actions at the top that are directly connected to the sales objective you’ve targeted them to achieve.
At the base of this pyramid sit their moral values and aptitudes. Their moral values define the things they instinctively believe are right or wrong, whereas their aptitudes define their innate talents and natural abilities, the things they find easy to be good at.
The layer above contains their motives and personality traits. Their motives are what drives them and are their fundamental reasons for doing things. Their personality traits define who they are or, more accurately, they describe how they’ll typically behave in certain situations.
Together, their moral values, aptitudes, motives and personality are their key traits. While they’re fundamentally important, what’s crucial to understand is that neither you, nor they, can change them. The jury’s out on whether they’re determined more by nature or nurture, but despite the fact they might change slowly over time, traits are aspects over which we have almost no conscious control.
Because we can’t change them, traits are things that an organisation needs to focus on understanding, particularly at the recruitment stage. Companies need to select people for their traits and develop them for competency, because it’s competencies that sit above traits in the blueprint.
The layer above their motives and personality contains their mindsets. Their mindsets describe how they tend to think and respond in certain situations and, like any layer in the pyramid, they’re affected by everything that sits beneath them. Interestingly, while their mindsets form part of their competencies (because they can be consciously developed), they’re also partly trait-like because they can be difficult to change. Changing a mindset is not impossible, but it’s easier to shape one than it is to change it completely.
Above their mindsets sits their sales knowledge and skills: what they know and what they can do. Then, above those sit their sales behaviours, which describe what they actually do and how they do it.
Right at the top of their pyramid sit their key performance indicators or KPIs. These are split into two types: their input KPIs that sit within the pyramid; and their output KPIs that sit just above their pyramid directly below your sales objective.
Their input KPIs are the important sales behaviours that are both measurable and within their direct control, which is why they sit inside their pyramid. Their output KPIs are the things that happen as a result of their inputs but are outside of their direct control, which is why they sit outside of their pyramid. For example, an input KPI might be the number of calls they make, whereas an output KPI might be the number of sales they successfully close. They can control the number of calls they make, but even the best salesperson can’t fully control the number of sales they achieve as a result.
So, if you exclude the traits you can seek to understand but can’t control, the biggest impact you can have on your team’s sales performance is to help them to develop their sales mindsets, knowledge and skills. These are the things that directly drive their sales behaviours and KPIs, and ultimately, improve their ability to achieve the sales objectives and targets you’ve set.
Defining & developing high-performance
For the reasons described above, the most effective sales training and development doesn’t just focus on skills, but on everything that salespeople need to think, know and do.
Taking time to understand exactly what this looks like in your organisation is a very worthwhile process. Not only will that give you a clear set of objectives for any sales training you deliver - regardless of whether it’s through formal instruction and teaching, or through one-to-one mentoring and coaching, but it will also give your team a practical understanding of what they need to work on personally.
Clearly identifying what great salespeople think, know and do helps them to understand that the secret to high-performance lies within the salesperson, not within sales tools or processes they’re given, or within the products or services they sell. Put another way, it can help each member of your team to take personal ownership of their performance.
Creating a detailed set of sales competencies isn’t (and shouldn’t be), a quick process, and might not be one you’re able to, or even want to, invest in. So if you don’t have a clear and documented vision for everything you need your salespeople to know, understand and embrace, I’ve developed a simple framework that you’re welcome to steal, or use as inspiration to create your own.
Here are the eighteen essential competencies I believe all salespeople need to develop:
How high-performing salespeople think: Six essential sales mindsets:
- Create a win-win (Win-Win Sales Mindset)
- Build and maintain trust (Trust-Builder Mindset)
- Add value for the customer at every stage (Value-Add Mindset)
- Focus on helping customers make decisions (Decision-Focussed Mindset)
- Maximise your return-on-investment (ROI Mindset)
- Recognise there’s always a way to do it better (Growth Mindset)
What high-performing salespeople understand: Five essential areas of sales knowledge
- What they’re selling
- Who to target
- Their goals, objectives, targets & KPIs
- Their role in the sales pipeline
- Their sales strategies & plans
What high-performing salespeople do: The new 7-step sale
- Step-1: Plan and prepare
- Step-2: Engage their customer
- Step-3: Understand their customer’s values, needs and wants
- Step-4: Propose and present the best solution
- Step-5: Trial close (and overcome objections or negotiate if necessary)
- Step-6: Close the sale
- Step-7: Follow-up
Of course, this is just a starting point off of which you can then hang more detailed descriptions and the specific processes, tools and techniques your team needs to use. But pinning each of these to an overriding framework like this will help you to develop a coherent vision of not only what a high-performing salesperson looks like within your organisation, but critically, of exactly how each of your team can get there.
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Written by Steve Radford
Steve Radford is a sales trainer, speaker and author of How To Sell. For over 25 years he’s helped B2B sales teams master conversational selling – inspiring salespeople to love selling so their customers love to buy. A Founding Fellow of the Institute for Sales Professionals, Steve has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands and has created training programmes now recognised across the UK.
If you’d like to know more about the Greater Sales Blueprint, or how you can help your team to develop mindsets, knowledge and skills framework in this article, visit greatersales.com, or check out Steve’s book: How To Sell – Everything you need to think, know and do to have greater sales conversations.