Content Marketing Today

Sales Success: It’s all about the right fit

A salesperson is a salesperson is a salesperson. Not so.

Because selling and sales professionals are fundamental to your in person content marketing strategy, you must develop just the right team for your company and your market.  However obvious this might seem, here’s why so many companies get it all wrong.

Identifying great sales people isn’t as simple as you might think. They don’t all look alike, think alike or act alike. One category of salesperson would die rather than get friends together to sell them Tupperware. Another breed thinks that the purpose of having a lot of friends is so that you can have lots of Tupperware parties.

Difficult or not, selecting the right sales candidate for the right sales situation is fundamental to building a successful company.

That’s why you should run out and buy, “Discover Your Sales Strengths,” by Benson Smith & Tony Rutigliano. They evaluate what determines sales success both from a salesperson’s perspective—and from that of his manager. The authors demolish common myths about sales people and replace them with a common sense approach to creating the right fit for sales success.

“Discover Your Sales Strengths” is based on decades of empirical research by the Gallup organization which set out to understand that ‘right fit.’ A typical client scenario would be to determine which reps are responsible for the vast majority of a company’s sales. Invariably, this follows the 80/20 rule; 20% of the reps make 80% of the sales. Gallup then determines what ‘strengths’ are common to those peak-performers.

Although the blend of strengths varies widely from company to company, the authors suggest that great reps are consistently able to:

· Build relationships

· Impact others—get a ‘yes’

· Uncover and fulfill client needs

· Focus on meaningful goals and rewards to drive their performance

· Find the best company, product, and client structure to optimize their sales results

Many companies may well understand many of these elements but are still adhering to well-worn myths about selecting and building top performers. For example, education is frequently a requirement for a sales position. The authors disagree, “In all the companies we have studied we have never—even in very technical fields—found a relationship between education and sales success.” They also shoot down other myths:

• You’ve got to have experience in a market or product to succeed
• A good salesperson can sell anything
• There is only one sales approach that will succeed
• Training will transform poor performers into effective reps
• Build relationships and sales will follow
• Money as the sole motivator
• Enough desire will carry you through

The authors suggest that it’s mostly about who you are rather than what you know or what you’ve done. In other words, our instinctive behavior drives us. For example, in a study of truck driver safety, they found that the safest drivers intuitively thought about what was going to happen next on the road. training can’t create that instinctive behavior pattern. Either you’ve got it or you don’t. So it is with sales people.

Great sales people evolve from the combination of their core strengths and the right job fit. As managers we must make that happen. Buy this book.