Sales Talent Is No Substitute For Hard Work

If you are a Sales Manager then one of your key duties is to deliver sales training to your team to improve their sales skills and so drive sales performance. However, in selling even the most talented team will not deliver unless that talent is backed by hard work.This article loooks at the factors, other than talent that are important for sales success.

A number of investigations into the reasons for success or failure for people in selling have been conducted. As a rule, these investigations ask questions about factors like motivation, understanding of the sales role, closeness to the company, the amount of sales training received or the quality of the sales manager's leadership. Until now, no one has answered the closely associated question as to whether the salesperson who works harder than his or her colleagues is also more successful. This was the reason for an American research project, which studied 380 sales people in the durable consumer goods line.The survey addressed five sales success factors:

Competitiveness. The successful salesperson gets much satisfaction when competing with others and desires to win.

Self motivation. A successful sales person works completely independently and has the ability to constantly motivate himself afresh.

The conflicts of a career in sales. Having doubts about your career at some point in your life is only human. For the sales person it is a question of how moral it is to convince or persuade the customer to buy the product or service.

The conflict of roles. Every salesperson has negative experiences almost every day. A high conflict in roles results in less clients being visited so that fewer negative experiences happen.

The effort made by the salesperson. Positive and negative factors work together and influence each other. Competitiveness and self motivations correlate or influence each other by 65%, the conflicts of a career in sales and conflict of roles, by 51%. Thus, both the desirable and undesirable factors usually occur together.

The initial conclusion from the survey was that sales people who were motivated and competitive had fewer problems. In the study there was a clear negative correlation between competitiveness / self motivation and the conflicts of a career in sales (-22% and '29%). This means that salespeople who are motivated and get satisfaction from competition have less problems in their careers.

Whether a salesperson makes more effort than colleagues depends on their ability to motivate themselves. Ultimately, the sales persons success is influenced by two things. Success factor number one is the effort the salesperson makes (62%), success factor number two is their competitiveness (15%). It is facinating to see that there is no direct correlation between a sales person's success and their level of satisfaction. Where a sales person is not subject to too many problems of conflicting roles and is making an effort they tend to be happier in their careers.

From these results we can make two management recommendations:

1. When interviewing new sales people, you should focus specifically on how competitive they are. People with a "fighting mentality" will be more successful.

2. Be strict about the way your sales people work. For example, set them a certain number of customer visits each month, check how they are handling objections etc. Sales people who put effort into doing the right things to generate sales will be more successful.

In sales there is a simple truth, which is that "nothing will come of nothing!" Sales people and Sales Managers who really put themselves out will assuredly achieve success. As the Sales Manager you can provide sales training to enhance your sales peoples selling skills and then manage your people so that they put these techniques into practice.

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