My wife and I were on a Mother's Day walk when we saw something I had never seen before.  I should have snapped a picture but I didn't, and could not find a single picture on the internet that captured what we saw.  So I went to Neural.Love and used AI to create the image above. The waterfall and lagoon the site added to the image was nice a bonus!

Looking at the mountain in front of us, the lower third was bright and vibrant green, with full-sized leaves on the trees.  The middle third was a duller, lighter green with new, young, and still growing leaves on its trees.  The top third of the mountain was brown, high enough in elevation that the leaves had not yet popped.  To make the mid-May look even more mystical, there was a slight haze covering the browner, top third.

The sight was very nice to look at but regular readers know that it could only be an analogy for something sales related.

Three things came to me at once.  The Hot and Cold Game came first because the colors on the mountain had to do with temperatures and in this case, hot, warm, and cold.  For some reason, Sales Process came next and I combined the three thoughts.

There is a correlation between sales process and sales success.  I once estimated that when a sales team did not have a company-wide sales process that their sales team followed, and such a process was created, optimized and executed, a 25% increase in sales followed.  Today I dug through Objective Management Group (OMG) data and will share my insights below but first, let's review the attributes measured within OMG's Sales Process competency.

Here is what I found:

Only 35% of all salespeople have the core competency Sales Process as a strength (greater than 66). 

Filtering by Sales Percentile, 82% of the top salespeople and 5% of the worst salespeople have Sales Process as a strength. The best salespeople are 1640% stronger at Sales Process than the worst salespeople. 

An alternate way to look at the Sales Process core competency is through average scores.  The worst salespeople (bottom 10%) score only 21% on Sales Process while the best salespeople (top 5%) score 77%.  The average score for all salespeople is 49%, eerily similar to the percentage of salespeople that hit quota in 2022.  The best salespeople score 367% better!

I also analyzed performance data and after filtering on salespeople who were not performing (below 80% of quota), only 4% were strong in the Sales Process competency.  The opposite of that analysis revealed that of those who were performing, 85% were strong in the Sales Process competency.  Salespeople who are strong in Sales Process are 2125% more likely to be performers.  That is very strong correlation!

Companies and their salespeople who are closely aligned and following the sales process are hot and green.

Companies and their salespeople who are not as closely aligned but still following the sales process to some degree are warm and light green.

Companies and their salespeople who are not closely aligned with or following the sales process are cold and brown.

Another way of putting this is that if you don't currently have a consistently effective, staged, milestone-centric, customer-focused sales process in place, you are probably being frozen out from winning some opportunities.  If you do have a sales process like that in place, your salespeople are probably on fire, winning the lion's share of opportunities.

Light a fire under sales process!

The Sales Process competency is just one of 21 Sales Core Competencies measured by OMG.  See all 21 here.

The landscaper called me over to look at a tree on our property.  He showed me the enormous hole and I asked, "What did that?"

"Woodpecker," he said.

On one side of the tree we had this perfectly cut, huge hole, and the other side of the tree had many small holes.  I learned that the Woodpecker that made the small holes were looking for food while the Woodpecker that made the huge hole was making a home.  Hunters and Farmers. 

Just like the two types of Woodpeckers, salespeople tend to fall into the same two categories of being either Hunters or Farmers.  In a perfect world, Hunters make lots of outgoing calls in order to find an opportunity which could pay them to eat.  Farmers work a single account and try to make them bigger.

Other than predators, there isn't much to stop a woodpecker from doing their thing, but there are plenty of things that could interfere with a salesperson's Hunting or Farming efforts.  Let's discuss them.

Let's begin with the Hunters. While many tech companies have adopted the use of BDRs to conduct inbound and outbound prospecting, most companies in most industries did not go there.  So let's assume that we are talking about a traditional sales organization with traditional salespeople who have responsibility for both finding and selling opportunities. If the salesperson already works at your company, you know if they are hunting because those who hunt consistently regularly add new opportunities to the pipeline. But what about the salespeople who don't hunt consistently.  Do you know why? The seven reasons most often to blame are:

• Sales Managers.  What?  Yes, sales managers who fail to hold their salespeople accountable for the agreed upon prospecting activities are enabling those non-hunting salespeople.
• Fear of Rejection - they fear that a prospect will say, "No," or "Not Interested," and that will destroy them
• Need to be Liked - they believe that if they interrupt a prospect and the prospect becomes upset, the prospect won't like them.
• Call Reluctance - they refuse to make cold calls.
• Perfectionist - they won't make the calls until they are sure the calls will be perfect but, of course, there is no such thing as a perfect call.
• Time Management - they have time for everything except making prospecting calls
• Nobody Answers the Phone - a nice excuse since it can take anywhere from 8-15 attempts to reach a decision maker and most salespeople give up after 4 attempts.

If the salesperson does not work for you - yet - but they are candidates for a sales role that requires Hunting, you need a crystal ball.  In this case, you aren't as concerned with why they might not hunt, you must know, in advance, if they WILL hunt.

In both scenarios, one of the assessments from Objective Management Group (OMG) can help.  For your existing salespeople, a sales team evaluation will help you understand if you can get your non-hunting salespeople to become hunters.  For potential salespeople, OMG's Sales Candidate Assessment will tell you whether or not they WILL prospect consistently and you can take that prediction to the bank as no assessment is as accurate and predictive as OMG's Sales Candidate Assessments.

According to OMG's data from the evaluations and assessments of more than 2.3 million salespeople, 68% of salespeople are strong in the Hunter Competency.  But don't rejoice just yet.  If we look more closely, we see that 95% of the top 10% of all salespeople are strong Hunters so what does that mean for the rest?  If we look at the bottom 50% - half of your current and potential future salespeople - only 34% are strong Hunters and that drops to just 6% of the bottom 10%.  Ugh.

Thankfully, OMG measures more than the Hunting competency as that is only one of the twenty-one Sales Core Competencies featured in OMG's various evaluation tools.

The other type of salesperson we were discussing earlier in the article is the Farmer.  While more salespeople tend to be attracted to the Farmer role than the Hunter role, attraction does not equal well-suited.  There are several reasons why salespeople in Farmer roles fail to significantly grow their large accounts:

• Unable to reach decision makers so those in power are unfamiliar with the salesperson.
• Unable to penetrate the account both vertically and horizontally resulting in lost opportunities
• Unable to provide value because of a focus on pricing
• Order-taking vs account growth mentality
• Risk averse so they focus on not losing the account rather than growing the account
• Lack of strong relationships across the account so when a key individual leaves the account is vulnerable
• Faulty sense of loyalty where they advocate for their customer instead of for their company

The next time you are in your yard you might hear a woodpecker but you probably won't see it.  Is the Woodpecker hunting or farming, and does that even matter?  There's not much you can do about it anyway.  However, at your company, there is a lot you can do.  Get your sales team evaluated so you can identify why your sales team isn't more effective and what you can do to train and coach them up.  Utilize OMG's Sales Candidate Assessments to improve your sales selection.  Your salespeople don't have to be Woodpeckers!

Check out all 21 Sales Core Competencies, comparison data by industry, and even how your salespeople compare here.

Take OMG's Sales Candidate Assessments for a free trial here.

Check out OMG's Sales Team Evaluation Samples here.

As we do each Friday in March and April, my wife and I drove to upstate New York to watch our son's college baseball games.  But this article isn't only about normal, it's also about the abnormal in both baseball and sales.

For miles along I-90 in Western Massachusetts, both on Friday and returning Monday morning, there was only 1 very weak bar of signal on Verizon's wireless network.  Not acceptable and not normal.

The temperature for spring baseball games is usually in the 40's and on nice weekends, the 50's.  It touched 90 degrees for the two games on Saturday and was in the 70's for the two Sunday games.  Very acceptable but not normal.

The leaves were on the trees!  Acceptable but not normal.

Our son had 4 hits on Saturday.  Acceptable but not normal.

I looked at the stats for the nine starters in the Friday night Boston Red Sox game and six of them had batting averages that were not only well below the league average of .243, they were all below .200. Very unacceptable and not normal.

If we look at the capabilities of a typical sales team, failing to meet the CEO's revenue requirements, it would be quite normal for us to see two thirds of the sales team falling significantly below the industry or global averages.   Unlike the statistics used by baseball management and operations and devoured by fans, sales stats comparing sales contributors and sales teams aren't available, preventing Senior Sales Leaders and the C Suite from seeing how their sales team compares with other sales teams in their industry.  At least that's how the thinking goes.  But it's untrue.  Those comparisons are available and have been available.  Objective Management Group (OMG) has those statistics on more than 2.3 million salespeople and thousands of sales teams in 200 industries.  OMG makes that data available and I'll show you where you can see the stats for your industry, and even see how your sales team compares to both the industry norms, as well as the abnormals like the top 10% and bottom 10%.

Most executives review their sales team and determine who the A's, B's and C's are based on revenue.

"Revenue is not, has never been, and never will be an indicator of sales effectiveness. "

Revenue is revenue and Executives have revenue sensitivity. Watch this 3-minute video to better understand what I mean.

 

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3:13

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stop using revenue to rank your salespeople or to conclude that your salespeople with the most revenue are good salespeople.  It's fiction.  It's BS.  It's misinformation.  It will lead you to make bad decisions.  Revenue represents what customers spend with you.  Sales effectiveness is the measure of a salesperson's ability to grow revenue by bringing in new business.

OMG measures 21 Sales Core Competencies.  You can see the stats for all 21 competencies for all salespeople here, select your industry to see the industry-specific stats, and begin the process to see those same stats for your sales team.  This is FREE!  After seeing your aggregate scores compared to your industry and the rest of the world, you can optionally receive a variety of detailed reports and files for a fee.

Enjoy!

Image copyright Copyright 123RF

If I created a list of the top sitcoms of all time, I could end up with a list that includes the following shows:

• Friends
• Seinfeld
• The Office
• Everybody Loves Raymond
• The Cosby Show
• How I Met Your Mother
• All in the Family
• I Love Lucy
• Cheers
• Family Guy

If I sent out a survey and asked you to vote on the top sitcoms of all time, the list would have 100 sitcoms to choose from and we might end up with a list that looks like this one.

The keys to these two questions and hypothetical lists are that the first list is my opinion and the second list would be the results of a survey, a popularity contest, or opinions of the masses.

While that's all fine and good when it represents people's opinions of pop culture, it's not fine and good when it comes to business best practices, assessments that could impact whether an individual is offered a job, or even business processes.

More specific to the topic of this Blog, Sales Core Competencies, Sales Candidate Assessments, and Sales Processes cannot be created from popular opinion, surveys or personal bias.  

Conduct a Google search for attributes of successful salespeople and you'll see a page with these results:

These articles include the opinions of college professors, writers and editors reporting on survey results, and people sharing their opinions.  For example, Hubspot, an inbound marketing company published a list of 18 Sales Core Competencies which include non-sales competencies like customer service and data analysis.  Job site Indeed published a list of 18 Sales Core Competencies which include non-sales competencies like leadership and change management.  I'm not suggesting that these capabilities aren't important, but in no way, shape or form should they be considered core sales competencies.  Why would people turn to any of these lists of opinions when there is a widely accepted, definitive list of 21 Sales Core Competencies backed by science and data on more than 2.3 million salespeople?  Perhaps it is a byproduct of Information overload and confusion.  People don't always find the accurate list on their first try.

The same thing happens when you search for sales candidate assessments.  Pages and pages of assessments all claiming to be the one that will prevent you from making a sales hiring mistake.  Most of them are not even sales assessments.  Instead they are personality assessments being marketed as sales assessments.  Again, why use an imposter when the real, accurate and predictive sales candidate assessment is right there, among the choices?  There are simply too many opinions and too much misinformation, as I wrote about earlier this week.   

When it comes to sales process the choices are even worse.  Consider this article about how most sales processes are so old. Yet there they are, being positioned as the solution for selling in the modern era.  More surprising, companies are using them but despite that, there are solid sales processes and useful CRM applications that work in perfect harmony, although you do need experts you can trust to point you in the right direction.

Once upon a time I would have been tempted to use a phrase like, "follow the science" but thanks to years of internet misinformation, it is difficult to know who to trust, who are the true experts and which science is real science. Unfortunately, we must default to skepticism, not trust, the subject of Malcom Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers which I wrote about last week.

I'll tell you what I think but I'm biased too.  I believe in what I've developed over the past 37 years but maybe that's all you need to know.  37 years of time-tested, proven, reliable, accurate and predictive results backed by science.

There is no sales assessment more accurate and predictive than Objective Management Group's (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessment. Period.. 

Not coincidentally, OMG measures all 21 Sales Core Competencies in detail, providing more than 200 data points on each sales candidate along with our recommendation as to whether the candidate will succeed in the role under consideration.  See the competencies, average scores, and sort by industry or company for free.  You can even see how your salespeople compare here.

When it comes to sales process, it's hard to top Baseline Selling, a staged, customizable, milestone-centric, customer focused sales process based on sales best practices.  Baseline Selling is at its best when integrated into Membrain's easily customized, intelligent, process-based CRM application.

Finding the truth is only difficult when you place too much importance on opinions, surveys and writers.

Image copyright CNN

Here in the US, this Sunday marked the first Sunday of NFL Football.  It's the same (as always) but different (new games).  In their season debut, my New England Patriots did their best impression of my Boston Red Sox and lost 20-7.  Close game.

I've written several articles (same as always) about OMG (Objective Management Group) Tailored Fits/Proofs of Concept where I analyze the differences between a company's top producers and bottom producers to identify the findings/scores that differentiate their tops from their bottoms.  That is the science of sales performance and sales selection and the last time I wrote about it was in this article from February of 2022.  For comparison, the most recent example of a blowhard writing junk science without being scientific about what top salespeople do differently can be found in this article from August of 2022.

Today's article (new article) will go in the opposite direction and discuss strengths and skills that don't differentiate tops from bottoms.  

There are two types of findings we'll discuss here:

1) Findings that don't differentiate tops from bottoms within the same company because the tops and bottoms are equally ineffective (see urgency below);

2) Findings that rarely differentiate tops from bottoms across most companies and salespeople (see social selling below).

Personality:  We'll get personality out of the way right from the beginning.  OMG's data conclusively shows that personality is not a differentiator between top and bottom salespeople.  It might help some salespeople secure meetings but it does not help them win the business.  We've all seen salespeople with great personalities who consistently fail to meet and exceed their quotas, as well as salespeople who aren't nearly as personable but crush their numbers each month, quarter and year.  Personality is not predictive of sales success.  Never has been.  Never will be.

Reaching Decision Makers: OMG's science shows that salespeople who reach actual decision makers are 341% more likely to close the business, yet just 15% of the bottom half of all salespeople do this effectively.  As important as this Sales Core Competency is, for most companies it fails to differentiate tops from bottoms because neither the tops nor the bottoms consistently get themselves in front of decision makers.

Closing: OMG's science shows that  most salespeople, across the board, suck at closing so in most companies, the closing competency is unable to differentiate top from bottoms.  And as I've written before, closing is overrated.  If a salesperson effectively executes all of the stages and milestones required prior to closing, the business will close.

Friendly:  One of the attributes that OMG measures in the Relationship Building Core Competency, is the Likable attribute which never seems to differentiate top salespeople from bottom salespeople. My friends, employees, clients, partners and coworkers would all testify that my weakest Sales Core Competency by far is Relationship Building but somehow, I am likable.  Despite being likable, I have never closed a deal because I was so likable.

Urgency:  Other than winning the business, the most important outcome in the sales process is the establishment of urgency.  Urgency is a by-product of uncovering a compelling reason to buy from you, quantifying the compelling reason and learning about its impact on your prospect.  The best salespeople are 329% more likely to get prospects beyond "nice to have," establishing urgency, than weak salespeople.  Since only 1% of the bottom half of salespeople are effective at the Consultative Seller Competency, urgency is rarely a differentiator of tops from bottoms within any given company.

Presenting: Most salespeople achieve their highest scores in the Sales Core Competency called Presentation Approach so there isn't much difference between the tops and bottoms in this competency at most companies.  Surprisingly, the bottom salespeople are often better than the top salespeople at Presentation Approach because they rely upon and hone their presentation rather than using a Consultative approach.

Extroverted: The science shows that across the board, extroverted salespeople perform no better than introverted salespeople although introverted salespeople tend to have an edge when it comes to listening and asking questions. I have always liked the definitions of introverted and extroverted which suggest that extroverted salespeople are energized from their social interactions while introverts must use their energy for social interactions.  I'm introverted and I'm always exhausted from my rare socializing.

Integrity: Integrity is important - just ask @Larry Levine! But it is not one of the findings that tends to differentiate top salespeople from bottom salespeople.  Unfortunately, there are occurrences of OMG seeing high integrity sellers who struggle to build trust and low integrity sellers who are able to build trust.  What do prospects see?  Salespeople they trust and salespeople they don't trust.

Video Proficiency: In 2020 and 2021 we worked very hard to help salespeople discover, become comfortable with, use and leverage the ability to sell remotely over video, yet this skill does not differentiate top salespeople from bottom salespeople.

Social Selling: Despite the emphasis that has been placed on Social Selling (and in this context we are primarily talking about LinkedIn), this competency is not a differentiator between top and bottom salespeople.  While salespeople who are visible and active on LinkedIn may get the occasional meeting, they aren't more effective at closing that business.

At the core of all its services, OMG measures 21 Sales Core Competencies as part of both its Sales Team Evaluations and Sales Candidate Assessments.  Check them out and see how your salespeople compare with nearly 2.5 million salespeople in and out of your industry.

Image copyright 123RF

While you don't need to know a single thing about Baseball to read this, it is another article with a baseball analogy. If you don't enjoy reading my baseball analogies, you can ignore this but I must warn you that today's analogy will reveal the two underlying causes for sales opportunities getting stuck in the pipeline and not reaching a close.  If you don't care about that then bye-bye until the next article.

You're watching a baseball game on television and the announcer says, "And here's the pitch and there's a long drive hit deep to left field and it's deep, it's up, it's way back and GONE!!!!!  Home Run Dave Kurlan!"  OK, the announcer never said the Dave Kurlan part. Not even close. I was a singles hitter.  And I never played at a level that had announcers.  So there's that.  For entertainment sake, watch this classic 2-minute clip of Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs hitting the magical home run at the end of the movie, The Natural, one of my all-time favorite baseball movies right up there with The Sandlot and Field of Dreams.

Back to the home run.  A home run is the outcome of a perfect swing but what led to that swing being so perfect?  If we conduct a backwards looking analysis, an upper cut connected with the baseball and drove it at a speed of 110 MPH with a 30 degree launch angle.  The swing was perfectly timed.  The batter waited and exploded, getting every bit of torque into his rotation while using the full power of his legs.  He stayed back and had a nice, short, swing. Those moving parts working to perfection were important to the outcome but the most important thing was that he recognized the pitch, saw the ball and hit it.  All of the mechanics I just described were the result of practice.  He recognized the pitch, made the split-second decision to swing, his mechanics fired up on-demand, and he crushed the ball.

Pivot to selling.  If salespeople had announcers - and that would be so cool - the announcer would say, "And here's the pitch, it's a good one, it's both needs and cost appropriate, and the prospect had already agreed in principal to the price. It's been emailed and reviewed, the prospect liked it, it's signed it and it's SOLD!!! Half a Million dollar sale for Dave Kurlan!"  Like I said, I never had a play-by-play announcer but there is always one talking in my head...

Back to the sale.  The sale was the outcome of that particular opportunity but what led to that opportunity closing so easily?  Deconstructing the sale, we recognized that there was a real opportunity there, quickly built a relationship, uncovered a compelling reason for them to buy from us, developed credibility, created urgency, fully qualified the opportunity and developed a needs and cost appropriate solution.  As with baseball, those were the mechanics of the sales process but the key was creating urgency.

Urgency is the torque that moves an opportunity from nice-to-have to must-have and finally to taking action.  But urgency is also an outcome.  It requires advanced listening and questioning skills, something most salespeople struggle to develop.  But even listening and questioning skills require 2 supporting Sales DNA competencies.

1) You must be able to Stay in the Moment in order to truly listen and formulate the next question.  Staying in the moment or being fully present requires that we do not become emotional.  According to Objective Management Group's (OMG) data on 2,244,094 assessments of salespeople, only 37% of all salespeople have "Able to Stay in the Moment" as a strength and only 19% of the bottom half of all salespeople are able to do this. 

Last week, Dan Millman, author of more than a dozen spiritual self-help books and novels and best known for his book The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, wrote this message in his latest newsletter:

"In this brief newsletter we return to a core life skill — how we perceive and process our emotions. Having previously explored how small changes in the words we use can change our attitudes,  let’s now observe a nearly universal tendency to identify with our emotions when we say (or think or feel) “I’m angry;I’m sad; I’m afraid…”
Instead, given the reality that emotions arise and pass like the weather, and that we have no more control over arising emotions than we do over passing weather, what if we replaced the “I am” with the observation, “Angry weather, sad weather, fearful weather passing through…” 
Noting our changing emotional weather patterns (as we might in meditation) enables us to observe them from a distance. We can acknowledge, even accept and embrace emotional weather without clinging to it.
This emotional skill — this wording and thinking change — is simple but not easy. Old habits die hard until we replace them with new habits as this practice becomes natural. Try it and see."

2) If staying in the moment is crucial for listening, then equally critical for asking questions is  not NEEDING to be liked.  It's OK and even desirable to be likable, but you shouldn't NEED people to like you.  When you need to be liked it will make you uncomfortable or even fearful of asking a lot of questions, asking tough question, or having the difficult conversation with your prospect that nobody else has had with them.  According to OMG, only 40% of all salespeople have "Doesn't Need Approval" and only 15% of the bottom half have this as a strength.

Staying in the Moment and Not Needing to be Liked are 2 out of the 21 Sales Core Competencies required for Sales Success.  If we look at the data differently, and filter on just the top 5% of all salespeople,  the results are quite different. The best salespeople (the top 5%) don't usually have nearly this much difficulty as 65% of them are able to stay in the moment making the top salespeople 342% better at this than the bottom half!  And when it comes to not needing to be liked, 79% of the best salespeople have this as a strength making the top salespeople 527% better at this than the bottom half.

Do you want to hit more home runs and close more sales?  Work to overcome your need to be liked and become more effective staying in the moment.  The Sales DNA Modifier is an inexpensive online course that uses powerful affirmations to help you make dramatic changes and overcome a sales weakness in just 3 weeks. Start with the lesson on Need to be Liked, spend 5-minutes with it twice per day for 3 weeks and then move on to the other weaknesses as needed.

The Sales DNA Modifier is a home run for salespeople.

If your car was manufactured in the last few years, you probably have a rear camera that helps you see your surroundings when you need to back up, back into a parking space, or drive backwards on the interstate at 65 MPH.  Okay, maybe not the last one.  Somehow, my Genesis GV80 always knows to display its rear and overhead cameras when I'm pulling into the garage.  Not backing into the garage, but driving forward into the garage.  That is helpful because I can pull in just far enough to leave the maximum amount of room in front of the car, but still clear the garage threshold enough for the garage door to close without hitting the back of the car.  If the car could speak, it would be saying, "Dave doesn't know what he can't see back there but he needs to see it right now.  So I'm going to turn off the map display and instead, give him the two-camera intelligence he needs."  It's crazy!

Pivot to sales.  Wouldn't it be great if salespeople had the equivalent of two camera intelligence to see what they don't know they need to see?

Two-camera intelligence for salespeople is probably science fiction - a pipe dream - but it would have a bigger impact for sales success than how the view of the garage threshold assists with my parking!

The two-camera rear view would allow salespeople to:

• Inspect whether the answers provided by prospects truly answered their questions
• Learn whether there is truly enough budget available and whether the prospect will spend more to do business with them
• Learn who the real decision-makers are, why they are hiding, and how to get them engaged
• Uncover the prospect's most compelling reasons to buy from them
• Learn which of their competitors the prospect is talking with and how they compare
• Discover the criteria (reasons) on which the prospect will make their decision
• Discover the process (steps) by which the prospect will come to a decision
• Uncover the timeline for a decision
• Determine the prospect's level of commitment to solving their problem and moving forward
• Understand exactly how they can be a perfect fit for the prospect
• Determine how to improve their relationship with the prospect
• Connect the dots to create a perfect needs and cost appropriate solution

Two-camera intelligence for salespeople would provide visibility into the 12 most important qualification criteria.  Interestingly, the best salespeople already have this intelligence in their tool bag.  87% of the top 5% of all salespeople - the very best salespeople - have visibility into these criteria because their high-quality, value-added conversations easily uncover this information. By comparison, only 1% of the bottom half of all salespeople have that visibility.  Just 1%.  The group in the 50th-80th percentile aren't much better as only 19% of them have the Qualifier competency as a strength. The Qualifier competency is just one of 21 Sales Core Competencies measured by OMG's sales candidate assessments and sales team evaluations.  You can see all 21 Sales Core Competencies here.

All salespeople are told to qualify.  Some are trained to qualify.  Fewer are coached to qualify.  Most don't know how to properly qualify or they skip past it entirely because they fear that their opportunity won't qualify (they'll have to hunt for a new opportunity) or they fear that their prospect will become upset at them for asking the questions (their need to be liked).  If they plan to ask these questions like a survey, or like a game of 50 questions, then they should be afraid.  Qualifying doesn't work that way.  Salespeople must first build a case so that their prospects have an incentive to qualify themselves.  If the case hasn't been built, there isn't a prospect alive that would willingly subject themself to a dozen qualification questions.  The best salespeople know how to simply make this part of a wonderful two-way conversation that won't raise prospects' resistance.

Building a case is accomplished by taking a consultative approach to selling.  While weak salespeople are just as inept at consultative selling as they are at qualifying, only 49% of elite salespeople have mastered this competency.  Taking a consultative approach is clearly the achilles heal of the sales profession. 

Obviously, I won't send my car on my next sales call but most salespeople would fare better if they had my car's intelligence.

Several OMG Partners reached out to ask if I had seen the email that was circulating with the Top 20 Attributes of Successful Salespeople.

"I have," was my response and, "Look for a blistering article on Monday."

The article was 100% junk science and to use the word science would be a disservice to the word junk. Below, you'll find five reasons why this article was so wrong, so bad, so misleading, so pitiful, and just plain stupid:

1. The article listed the top 20 attributes of successful salespeople and the vast majority of those attributes might have something to do with success in general but have very little to do with sales success.  The email says that, "The results revealed the top five attributes are confidence (44%); ambition (33%); adaptability (25%) self-motivation (17%); and honesty (16%)."  None of those are sales-specific! Respondents didn't come up with these attributes on their own, but were given 30 to choose from.  They were asked to select their top 5 responses and the "report" listed the 20 most frequently chosen responses.  Unfortunately, most of these attributes have more to do with personality and behavior and are not even slightly related to OMG's widely accepted 21 Sales Core Competencies and related attributes.
2. Only 207 people participated in the survey and it came from "conversational intelligence."  Whaaaat?  207 isn't a meaningful sample size and certainly not one to brag about.  Compare that to the more than 2.2 million salespeople that OMG has assessed and a sample size on which I base all of my articles.  And what the F is conversational intelligence?  I searched Google for Conversational Intelligence and found a book by that title.  The description said, "The key to success in life and business is to become a master at Conversational Intelligence. It's not about how smart you are, but how open you are to learn new and effective powerful conversational rituals that prime the brain for trust, partnership, and mutual success."  Maybe.  But what does that have to do with the topic of this article?  I searched some more and found CallTrackingMetrics.com.  They defined Conversational Intelligence as, "The ability to identify and react to signals in verbal communications."  In summary, someone who is smarter than me will have to explain how conversational intelligence can identify the attributes of successful salespeople.
3. Jiminny, the company behind this survey, claimed to have researched millions of articles and couldn't find a single article that was not opinion based except for a 2011 article in Harvard Business Review.  Not a single one over eleven years?  Wow.  I have published more than 100 scientific articles on the attributes, competencies, and differences between successful salespeople and unsuccessful salespeople during that time period.  It's kind of difficult to miss 100 of them unless of course my articles don't support their narrative! 
4. It was a survey!  That's not science. In the case of this survey, it was merely 207 opinions from a limited and skewed list of options.
5. If the author (was there an author?) knew half of what I know about successful salespeople, they would know that the unsuccessful salespeople surveyed possess most of those same attributes.  They aren't differentiators!  And how do we know that unsuccessful salespeople weren't included in the survey?  Geez!

What are the actual top attributes of successful salespeople?  We should begin with the 21 Sales Core Competencies in which top salespeople score exponentially better than weak salespeople. Over the years, I have written many articles that articulate these differences but there have been a few which, from my perspective, stand-out .  If you're interested in how things have evolved over the past 11 years:

This article was from 2009.

This article was from 2015.

This article was from 2015.

These two articles were both written in 2016.   Also 2016 (HBR v OMG)

This article was written in 2018.

Junk science, limited data, tunnel vision, and in this case, a stupid-as-a-bowl-of-jelly analysis continue to appear although not as frequently as the fake news in politics.  But why do we continue to see them?

Today, it's easier than ever to write whatever you can imagine and that's where a lot of the fake news originates.  Someone writes or tweets something, somebody else shares it, an individual with a platform sees it and spreads it more widely and it eventually becomes a headline.

I've had enough - have you?

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When you think about cars, you know there are coupes, sedans, crossovers, SUVs, and sports cars.  You also know there are luxury cars, mid-range cars and economy cars.  You also know there are fast cars and slow cars, flashy cars and vanilla cars, big cars and little cars, white cars, black cars and every color in between.  But if you were to think about specific features that differentiate one car from another, you would have to really think about it, wouldn't you?  It used to be easy.  Air conditioning, power brakes, power steering, power windows, power seats, side mirrors and automatic transmissions were standard in the expensive cars but not available in the budget-priced cars.  Today, most cars, in most classes include all of those features as standard.

The same kind of thinking is required when thinking about the various roles of salespeople.  We can name them: Account Executive, Territory Manager, Business Development Rep, Sales Development Rep, Account Manager, Key Account Manager, National Account Manager, Channel Manager, Application Engineer, Sales Consultant, Inside Sales, Outside Sales, and more.

To further complicate things, in some companies and industries, Sales Managers function as salespeople and Sales VPs function as Sales Managers.

While the above roles have selling as a primary responsibility, there are as many differences to selling roles as there are differences to the class or style of cars.  Today, we'll explore the difference between an Account Executive and a Business Development Rep.

I collaborated with Joe DiDonato, Chief of Staff at Baker Communications, and together we produced the following comparison.

While both roles overlapped in 10 key competencies, the capabilities in the remaining 11 competencies were very different. 

A successful AE needs to excel at 18 of 21 competencies that OMG assesses, while a successful BDR needs to excel at 13 of the 21 competencies. BDRs perform lead follow-up, send emails and connection requests, and conduct cold-calling. The reality is that most individuals in that role aren’t very good at it, based on the data we've collected. There is a prevailing misconception that those 3 tasks don’t require much selling ability because it’s “all top of the funnel,” but success in the role requires proficiency in 11 different sales competencies.

It’s the nature of each role’s responsibilities - and the prospect’s point of entry into the sales process and funnel - that requires different strengths. A BDR is focused on closing the prospect on initial sales and proof of concept steps at the top of the sales funnel. They’re going to be faced with 9 out of 10 callers rejecting them – if not more - and must be able to shrug that off without taking the rejection personally. As a result, the BDR must be “rejection proof” in addition to having strong hunting and closing capabilities. 

In contrast, the AE role relies on relationship building to move the opportunity down the sales funnel and through the formal sales process. Included in that effort is a strong consultative selling ability, as well as the knowledge of how to convincingly sell value to the prospect – both essential skills in moving the opportunity forward. 

Next comes strong presentation skills as the proposed solution has to be presented to multiple stakeholders, as well as a keen understanding and respect of the formal sales process that successfully moves the opportunity forward. Rounding out the AE's portfolio of skills is that the AE must have a considerably stronger comfort level around discussing money. 

So many opportunities are squandered as a result of an AE's failure to verify that the money is there, it can be spent, they are willing to pay more, and the value of more has been established. AEs who are comfortable having that conversation will outsell those who don’t. When they skip, avoid, or vaguely cover finances, proposals are generated for prospects who either won’t buy or won’t pay the price resulting in price objections, delays, business lost to competitors, or prospects choosing to do nothing. 

One of the most significant differentiators between the most successful AEs and their less successful counterparts can be found in the sales competency called Supportive Buy Cycle (shown in the table above). The attributes in the Buy Cycle competency correlate to how salespeople go about the process of making a major purchase for themselves and salespeople tend to sell in a way that is consistent with how they buy. The best salespeople determine what they want to purchase and simply buy it - without much consideration of price, alternate sources, having to think it over, and more. 

Conversely, the weakest salespeople tend to conduct research, comparison shop, look for the lowest price, think things over, and some of them even hate salespeople and "being sold" something. As you might imagine, the weakest salespeople understand it when their prospects want to buy the same way that they do, while the strongest salespeople don’t understand that buying behavior, push back, and ask questions. 

Strong salespeople have the ability to eliminate competition, shorten the sales cycle, and help prospects buy on value instead of price. It’s difficult for some salespeople to grasp the concept and consequences of this competency. But when salespeople change the way they buy so that it supports ideal sales outcomes, their revenue increases by 50%.

As you can see from the analysis, the skill sets are very different. Many companies treat the BDR role as an entry-level position in preparation for the more demanding AE role at some future date. But as closely aligned as these two roles are in objectives, they require different skills to be successful. As a result, the movement between roles is not as easily accomplished as most sales managers hope.

Before we conclude the article, it's important to note that for each of these 21 Sales Core Competencies, OMG includes 8-10 attributes (64 on one of them) for a total of around 275 specific sales findings and scores.  We have a site that shows the following data for each competency:

• Average score for all salespeople
• Average score for the top 10%
• Average score for the bottom 10%
• Average score in your industry
• Average score for your company (you'll need some of your salespeople to take the evaluation to populate this bar on the graph - it's free for them to take it and populate the bar graph with your aggregate scores but you'll have to pay for the 30-page reports if you want them)

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I recently took these pictures of mushrooms on our property that I had not seen prior to this year.  Bright reds, bright oranges, whites and more.  After living on this property for the past twenty years, it really surprised me that these bright colored mushrooms appeared out of nowhere.  Then again, my wife and I have cut down a lot of trees and cleared a lot of brush in the last twelve months.  Could they have been growing there right along and we simply didn't see them?

Can you guess where this is going?

Have you ever had a sales opportunity that was completely under control, you were following your sales process, everything was looking great, and then, from out of nowhere and without warning, surprise competitors appeared?  

Yes, the magic mushroom competitors! 

Were those competitors competing for the business the entire time and the prospect didn't share that important piece of information?  Did you neglect to ask if they were talking with or looking at anyone else? Or, and this is important, were they eleventh hour additions to the game?  

The late-to-the-game addition is the easiest to deal with because we have the most clarity on this scenario.  Prospects invite additional competition when they are not 100% sold on one or more of the following 15 possibilities:

1. your offering
2. your price
3. your company
4. your timing
5. your delivery
6. your options
7. your responsiveness
8. your testimonials
9. your quality
10. your track record
11. your politics
12. your sense of humor
13. your location
14. your customer service
15. your technical service

Prospects generally don't want to compromise so it only takes one thing that was either not covered, not explained, not handled, not offered, or not included and they may look elsewhere.  So what can you do to make sure that never happens to you (again)?

You need to more thoroughly qualify your opportunities!!! 

EVERYTHING that could go wrong must be anticipated and discussed during your qualification stage. That's why you should never, ever, ever rely on a proposal or a quote or a Scope of Work to explain your offering, prices or fees.  Those documents merely formalize in writing what you have already agreed to!  YOU close and if they want to move forward WITH YOU, then you can send it. 

Prior to that you should discuss EVERYTHING from fees, to terms, to timelines, to alignment, to expectations, to fit, to yes, competition.  And if there is competition, discuss it, ask why, ask how they feel about them, who they are leaning towards, why, and what you can do about it?  And when it comes to what you can do about it, DO NOT EVER LET IT BE ABOUT LOWERING YOUR PRICE.  NEVER.  If they ask you to match or lower your fees, ask, "other than pricing, what can I do?"

Qualifying is one of the 21 Sales Core Competencies that Objective Management Group measures in both its sales force evaluations and its accurate and predictive Sales Candidate Assessments.

When it comes to hidden competition, don't act like you've been taking the magic mushrooms and developing happy ears.  ASK QUESTIONS!