Star Sales Professionals - Are you wired right?

Many have wondered what makes successful sales professionals. What’s the key to this magic formula which can help companies unlock millions, even billions of dollars in value? Different personas come to mind - Successful sales people should have extrovert personality traits – outgoing, ability to make connections and sustain strong relationships or the consulting sales avatar.

All with the intent to get into the minds of the decision makers and the organization one is selling to. How do you do that? Ability to have a strong understanding of human psychology is perhaps now more than ever the most important characteristic in successfully converting sales opportunities.

Let me explain this with an example

I recently came across a scenario where a mid-sized retailer has gone through a major leadership change – new CEO who brings in a new leadership team to arrest sagging business performance and market share loss to larger Tier 1 players.  

Understand the decision context

The new CEO starts off aggressively addressing the market share issue –

·         Focus on acquisitions – makes select acquisitions in blue ocean market segment consolidating the retailer’s position

·         Places bets on few products – assesses the product value chain across operations and technology, identifying gaps like slower time to market, low business automation etc.

·         Change the culture to an inclusive one with greater ownership and accountability to employees and investors

Technology and operations has been seen as laggards and growth inhibitors. The new leadership team was tasked with a larger transformational agenda to make the business process efficient and change its own culture.  

Take time to understand your key stakeholder’s current context of decision making

Past context - In the previous role, this CIO has balanced risks with business model transformation – selectively taking risks in areas which required significant change, leaving others on existing models which were under acceptable levels of outcomes.

Current Context – The CIO had to bring in a new leadership team and create a culture of accountability and ownership. The mandate was to radically transform technology – deliver key business outcomes and ensure stability & resilience.

What clicked?

From analysis of human psychology, it was found that the CIO forms an own opinion rather than rely on the team, but takes them along on every step. Using the right language with the right words resonating with the CIO’s decision making philosophy was important. Also, engaging in conversations around the challenges which will come and how to prepare the organization to face them was critical. Analysis also showed that the CIO expected transparency and honesty, even if that meant compromising your organization’s revenue prospects in the short term.  

It’s important for sales professionals to have a strong understanding of human psychology of their stakeholders at various levels within the prospect organization – it’s a skill more important than anything else.

In my next post, I will reveal another key attribute in star sales professionals.