What is the Single Biggest Differentiator Between Top and Bottom Salespeople?

  • October 3, 2016
  • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
  • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

Thanks for continuing to read my Blog – I appreciate it.  There is one Blog that I never fail to read, and that’s Seth Godin’s Blog.  Seth doesn’t write about sales – he pens a thought leadership Blog – but sometimes his articles are very applicable to sales and selling.  Recently, he posted two very short articles – each is less than 30 seconds to read and I believe they are both well worth your time.

The first is Fully Baked.  The second, on a related topic, is Skills vs. Talents.

Over the years, I have seen first hand that one of the major differences between great and mediocre salespeople is that great salespeople want to improve – they made themselves great – and mediocre salespeople aren’t willing to make the changes to become more effective.  Great salespeople strive for mastery while underachievers don’t.  Back in the 1950’s Albert Gray said something along the lines of, “Sales winners do the things they don’t want to do and the others don’t.”

All professions have their small percentage of practitioners who aren’t very good, but can you imagine the impact we would experience if attorneys, accountants or engineers underperformed to the same degree as nearly half of the sales population?

You can see evidence of that in this article where the data shows that the best salespeople have twice the level of commitment to achieving greater sales success than their underachieving counterparts.  You read that correctly – that’s twice as committed!

All salespeople can develop the skills to achieve greater sales success, but only those who are committed enough to make changes can overcome Sales DNA that doesn’t support the execution of those skills.  Even so, most salespeople fail to learn even the skills necessary for sales effectiveness in 2016.  And improving their Sales DNA?  Most salespeople have never even heard the phrase and aren’t aware that their sales DNA needs to be improved.  We know you can’t fix stupid, but how do you fix uninformed?