Nature vs. Nurture: Sales “Traits” You Can Learn -- Part 4

Be sure to read Part One, Part Two and Part Three of this series.

I can hear some skeptics complaining: “How can you possibly teach someone to be smart?” To understand how the right kind of training makes your sellers smarter you must appreciate the particular role being smart plays in sales.

Conventional smart means that you can process information quickly. The smart person is like a combination James Bond and Sherlock Holmes: Smart in meetings, properly ingesting all relevant sales information and outputting perfect-fit solution presentations.

I wish I were that smart, but sadly I’m saddled with an average brain. When I first got into sales, my average ability to process information meant that it took me longer to learn the lessons of sales. As a result, I was stuck in first gear for a long time -- until I learned how to think like a smart salesperson.

Smart salespeople are always asking themselves, “What happens next?” For example, the client says they want to hear about your offering. The average salespeople are linear in their thinking. They schedule their meetings to give the customer what they asked for, but don’t ask themselves the question, “After I deliver my brilliant, full-capability presentation, then what? Do I conclude my presentation with the contract? What steps are between my presenting and someone handing me a signed contract?”

The smart salesperson begins considering what happens next from the first conversation of the sale. As opposed to the average salesperson who sees each sales opportunity as unique, the smart salesperson immediately recognizes that there are 3–6 usual “starting points” depending on the person he or she is meeting. Add to that their past buying history and they get a handful of likely scenarios.

Given that starting point and the seller’s history of closing sales from the very beginning, the smart salesperson thinks out the odds of closing that sale, the probable big obstacle/objection, and decides the recommended strategy to move the sale forward.        

The smart salesperson recognizes the pattern like an algorithm and, like a recommendation widget, comes up with the recommended next move.

Training that produces smart salespeople focuses on patterns we can recognize, as well as creative strategies that give us different starting points and a wider range of more-likely solutions. With this kind of training, the (now) smarter salespeople are better at turning around common objections, better at answering questions that can be anticipated. They become better than the average salespeople at recognizing when the odds are long.

Unlike the untrained salesperson who makes poor time management decisions, the trained-to-be-smart salesperson knows when the best strategy is to move on to the next sale. That’s why the very smart salespeople are always prospecting: Their training has taught them to keep looking for the “easier-to-close” sale.

Your challenge is to be smarter than your already smart competitors.

For smart competitive sales training, schedule a free consultation with DM Training today.

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