I surveyed 53 sales managers and asked them (among other things) what essential skills their top-performing salespeople possess.
Okay, it wasn’t a real recording. However, our team at Sales Readiness Group (SRG) recently completed the rollout of a sales training program from a large sales organization, and I reviewed my notes from interviews with top sales managers as part of the fit process. As I studied these notes, I began to notice trends.
I reviewed notes from conversations with sales managers from other major projects that SRG had recently completed. These sales organizations were in different industries—technology, financial services, life sciences, and manufacturing—and had sales cycles that ranged from simple to highly complex. Nevertheless, several clear themes emerged.
Here are critical insights based on my unscientific “survey” of these 53 conversations.
Prospecting is always a problem
This one was almost unanimous. The inability to consistently add new sales opportunities to the top of the pipeline was a major concern for most managers.
Great reps differentiate themselves through disciplined prospecting. For those managing enterprise vendors in my survey, better prospecting often meant the salesperson expanding their footprint in an existing account or booking appointments with senior stakeholders at new accounts. For those managing small and medium-sized business (SMB) teams, better prospecting started with their salespeople having the discipline to maintain consistently high activity levels.
Great reps do these three things
When I asked about the sales skills that set their top performers apart from the bottom performers, the answers usually included active listening, call planning, and asking thoughtful questions.
It surprised me how often sales managers identified active listening as the number one sales skill they correlated with top sales performance.
Product knowledge must be translated into solutions
It is a given that successful salespeople must have excellent product knowledge. But the sales managers told me that the best performing reps on their teams can apply their product knowledge to the customer’s unique problem.
The secret sauce of super reps was the combination of product knowledge, gaining a deep understanding of the customer’s problem, and then applying their intelligence and creativity to solve that problem.
Pay attention to the intangibles
The sales managers did not agree on everything. As for the intangible, their responses varied. Qualities such as work ethic and curiosity (this one surprised me) were often mentioned, but so were coaching, competitiveness, resilience, and motivation.
You can’t train on the intangibles, but you can rent on them. However, your own cognitive biases can get in the way here. You are apt to hire people like you. You can overcome this similarity-attractiveness bias by looking for the characteristics of other successful salespeople on your team and repeating the top performers.
While I fully admit that my “survey” results are unscientific, I think many of the ideas and concepts discussed by these 53 executives will resonate with most sales leaders.
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