Three Ingredients to Being Successful in Sales

In a world of information overload, it’s easy to find the “7 Magic Steps to Financial Freedom”, or the “10 Most Important Attributes of a Great Sales Person”, but the real challenge is in assimilating all this information and consistently implementing whichever various tactics work best for you.

Over the past twenty years, we’ve interviewed 100’s of top sales people and simply asked them what makes them so good. We even followed many of them out into the field to watch them in action and reviewed their sales personality-test results. Interestingly, we found that while each of them had a slightly different sales style and various different sales tactics, they each followed a specific recipe that could be attributed to their success in sales.

Based on this analysis, we coined the ingredients to this recipe, “The 3 Rights”: the Right attitude, focus on the Right things, and persevere until you get it Right.

The RIGHT Attitude

First, and most clearly, we noticed that sales people with the highest success rate, approached everything they did with the right attitude; yes, everything.

We saw these top sales people approaching prospecting, overcoming objections, and even cleaning out their car after a long day on the road with the right attitude. While there are many different variations of the “right” attitude based on the industry and the situation, each person showed a diehard positive vibe regardless of the task at hand.

Every time we meet with sales professionals, it’s easy to pick out who will be a top performer by their attitude towards the toughest, and in some cases menial, tasks they face each day. While honing your sales skills are critical to success, if your attitude is off, you’re not setting yourself up for success.

Focus on the RIGHT Things

Second, we saw a common element in each top performer’s commitment to a specific sales methodology. We noticed that each sales person had her own way of overcoming objections, presenting the product or service, and following up.

The key to success was not which sales book she read, but rather her laser focus on figuring out what worked best for each scenario, and committing to it every time. In our research, the best sales people were always learning new sales tactics and were always ahead of the trends in their industry. However, as they implemented tactics that worked, they latched on to them.

No matter how attractive a shortcut might have appeared, they stayed focused on their near perfect methodology.

Persevere until you get it RIGHT

As we looked for common threads among the top performers, we noticed they all were proud to share stories of their top clients and all the challenges they overcame to make the initial close. While each story was different from the other, they all shared the same theme: ‘It seemed impossible’; ‘I kept trying’; ‘I eventually had a small success and ultimately I came out on top’.

Perseverance seems to take the first two Rights and wrap them in Kevlar®. When hit with a meeting cancellation, top performers brushed it off and got back on the calendar; when told “no”, top performers knew it just meant the prospect hasn’t said yes, yet. And most importantly, for each negative response, top performers had multiple “yes’s” in their pipeline, many of which had said no a few times before.

So, don’t shy away from reading that new sales book that’s on the best sellers list, go ahead and register for the sales training seminar next week, but be sure you actively pursue a personal mantra of The 3 Rights and make them the foundation of your sales career.