Yesterday, although I wasn't looking for it, I found my laptop charger that I misplaced a few weeks ago.  Today, I found a shirt I wasn't looking for. It was purchased in May, but I had forgotten about it.  Later today, a post appeared in my LinkedIn feed and although I wasn't looking for an article by a physician, I read it and am so glad I did.

Would you like to know what I loved about that article?  I'll share, but first, consider that...

...Salespeople have a bad reputation.

Half of all salespeople are incredibly ineffective and provide very little value to their prospects and as such, they deserve the bad reputation they have.  Not because they are dishonest, sleazy or greedy - most of them aren't - but because they add no value.

On the other side of the coin, the top 30% of salespeople generally do add value and their prospects appreciate them, favor them and buy from them.

The LinkedIn post pays tribute to medical device salespeople.  They may not be in the top 30%, they may not be adding tremendous value, but this physician, speaking on behalf of most physicians, tells us just how valuable they are to the surgeons who perform in the operating room, and points out how unfairly these salespeople are being treated.

Hooray for Dr. Scott Sigman MD.

Hooray for his bravery.  We heard from a small number of brave doctors during Covid who were brave enough to push back and tell us the truth about the virus how to treat it, the vaccines and the real dangers, and how masks and lockdowns didn't stop the virus.  Dr. Sigman has gone out on a limb and rallied to the defense of salespeople.

Whether or not you are in sales or sales leadership, you probably work in a company whose revenue is generated by salespeople.  That means your salary is made possible by the efforts of salespeople.  You must read the short LinkedIn post and then come to your own conclusion.

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From time to time I record impromptu unscripted rants as well as some that are more well thought-out videos.  From among the collection presented below, most are rants so the rants are much more popular.  The most-watched (I have added to the list so there are more than 10 now!) videos are shown below in order of popularity and while I like all of them, I indicated my personal favorites with an asterisk.  All but three of the videos are three-minutes or less, one is six-minutes, one is ten-minutes and one is eight-minutes.  Topics include:

1. Revenue Sensitivity - a rant on the lack of correlation between top salespeople and revenue

2. On Sales Process and Methodology - the difference between popular sales processes and methodologies

3. Why Your Prospects Won't Talk with You and What to Do About it - a rant

4. On Attracting Salespeople When Recruiting - a rant on the Two Keys to Attracting More of the Right Sales Candidates

5. Transactional versus Consultative Selling - a rant

6. Why Forecasts are Always So Inaccurate - a rant on why it's not the forecast!

7. Dinger's Listening Skills - how my Dog's Listening Skills are better than those of most salespeople

8. Protect Your References - a rant on why you shouldn't give out references unless it's the perfect time

9. Why People Should Consider a Career in Sales

10. On Cold Calls - a Rant

11. Nothing has Changed in 35 Years - a Rant

12. On Not Getting Distracted

13. How to Shorten and Speed Up the Sales Process

14. Why Sales Training Doesn't Work

15. The Importance of Momentum in Sales

16. Momentum Part 2 - The Importance of Discipline and Consistency and Why You Need Both

17. Don't Make This Critical Mistake as We Move Forward into the Recession

18. Sales and the Importance of Having a Quality Conversation

19. Why Do Salespeople Chase So Many Unsellable Opportunities?

20. The Importance of Getting Your Messaging Right

21. Stop Discounting!

22. Don't Leave Your Job!

1.  On Revenue Sensitivity *

2. On Sales Processes and Methodologies

3. Why Your Prospects Won't Talk with You and What to Do About it

4.  On Attracting Salespeople When Recruiting

5. Transactional Versus Consultative Sales

6. Why Forecasts are Always So Inaccurate

7. Dinger's Listening Skills *

8. Protect Your References

9. Why People Should Consider a Career in Sales *

10. On Cold Calls

11. On How Nothing Has Changed in 35 Years.

12. On Not Getting Distracted

13. On How to Shorten and Speed Up the Sales Process

14. On Why Sales Training Doesn't Work

15. On The Importance of Momentum in Sales

16. Momentum Part 2: The Difference Between Discipline and Consistency - You'll Need Both!

17. Don't Make This Mistake as We Move Forward Into the Recession

18. Sales and the Importance of Having a Quality Conversation

19. Why Do Salespeople Chase So Many Unsellable Opportunities?

20. The Importance of Getting Your Messaging Right

21. Stop Discounting

22. Don't Leave Your Job!

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We had a request for some data from one of our longtime partners.  My knee-jerk reaction to her request was that it would be a big nothing burger.  She asked for data that would show the difference between salespeople who are goal oriented and those who are not.  I did not expect much of a difference except in the area of Motivation but I was wrong.  Very wrong!  Check out some of the profound differences this data mining uncovered!

Objective Management Group (OMG) measures 21 Sales-specific Core Competencies. You can see them all here.  We have data from our evaluations and assessments of 1,940,502 salespeople. Can you guess which of the 21 sales competencies shows the most profound difference between those who are goal-oriented and those who are not?

Hunting.  That's what you guessed, right?  The average score for the Hunting Competency for goal-oriented salespeople is 82% while those who are not goal oriented have an average score of only 68%.  Goal oriented salespeople are 21% stronger at Hunting!  If you think about it, this makes sense because without goals or a plan, the need to prospect for new business is not as obvious or urgent.  "Prospects consistently" and "Maintains full pipeline" are 2 of the10 attributes of the Hunter competency.  Are you looking to hire new salespeople that will grow your business?  Use an accurate and predictive sales candidate assessment to help select ideal salespeople for your selling role.

Motivation.  This one was a no brainer as "Has written personal goals" and "Has a plan to achieve goals" are 2 of the attributes of the Motivation competency.  Those who are goal oriented have an average score of 81 versus the average score of 61 for those who are not.

Revenue.  This isn't a competency but this finding was screaming for my attention.  Those who are goal oriented have average revenue of $3.8 million while those who are not saw averages of only $2.7 million.

Sales Percentile.  This score places salespeople in a range from 0-100.  A Sales Percentile score of 100 would mean that a salesperson is better than 100% of all salespeople while a Sales Percentile score of 0 would mean that 100% of all salespeople are better than this salesperson.  Goal oriented salespeople have an average Sales Percentile of 64 while those who are not goal oriented have an average Sales Percentile of only 45.  Goal oriented salespeople score 42% better!

Responsibility.  Interestingly, goal oriented salespeople are 21% stronger at taking responsibility and as a result, are far less likely to make excuses for their lack of performance.

Sales DNA is the combination of strengths that support the execution of sales process, sales methodology, sales strategy and sales tactics.  However, when Sales DNA is weak, it sabotages rather than supports.  Sales DNA isn't learned.  Sales DNA isn't skills.  So it blew my mind to see the correlation between goal oriented and stronger Sales DNA.  The difference is profound.  Generally speaking, as the difficulty of the selling role increases, the minimum Sales DNA score required for success increases with it.  For example, if you sell 7-figure capital equipment to the C-Suite of Enterprise sized companies against huge competitors where the incumbent is difficult to replace, that level of difficulty requires a minimum Sales DNA of 82.  If you're selling SaaS to small businesses, you can probably succeed with a Sales DNA of 72.  If you're selling commercial batteries to fleet parts managers you can probably succeed with a Sales DNA of 66.  Goal oriented salespeople have Sales DNA that is 6 points higher and when it comes to Sales DNA, that's a huge difference maker!

Selling Competencies.  10 of the 21 Sales Core Competencies that we measure are pure selling competencies, like:

• Hunting
• Relationship Building
• Consultative Selling
• Value Selling
• Qualifying
• Presentation Approach
• Closing
• Sales Process
• CRM Savvy
• Social Selling Mastery

When we combine the average scores of the 10 selling competencies above, goal oriented salespeople are 20% stronger with an average score of 60, compared to an average score of 50 for those who aren't goal oriented.

Goal oriented salespeople score higher in every single competency.

Here's the biggest takeaway.

83% of elite salespeople (the top 5%) have written personal goals while only 44% of weak salespeople (the bottom 50%) have written personal goals.  That's an 89% difference!

76% of elite salespeople have a plan for reaching their goals while only 25% of weak salespeople have a plan for reaching their personal goals.  That's a 304% difference!

Together those two findings make up the goal oriented finding and while it alone is not predictive of sales success. However, goal oriented is an attribute of the Motivation Competency and that does correlate perfectly with sales success as you can read in this article.

Those who have written personal goals and a plan are far more likely to be top performers than those who don't. Goal setting is low-hanging fruit so why aren't more companies providing their salespeople with professional goal setting programs?

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The choices come from two categories:

1. Distract
2. Engage

Distract includes catching up on your reading, browsing the net, stepping out for a beverage and/or snack, making a social call, chatting with colleagues, relaxing, driving, or taking a nap.  It also includes getting things on your to-do list taken care of, administrative work, proposal writing, quotes, responding to email and other non-selling time work that could be done during the evening or the hours before the sun comes up.  Distract is the sales version of charcoal.  It's dirty.

Engage is phone specific.  It includes returning calls, diving into CRM and making calls to move opportunities forward, making calls to schedule new meetings, and making calls to get introductions. Engage is the sales version of Diamond.  It's crystal clear.

In other words, when you find yourself with engage time during business hours, that should translate to phone specific action.  Everything else must be done after hours.

Many salespeople are so busy getting the work done that they don't see how much selling time they waste doing administrative work that can be postponed until later.  Instead they do their administrative work and postpone their selling.  This Google search reveals that most salespeople spend between 3% and 35% of their time actually selling.  When we correlate these percentages with selling effectiveness, the top 23% of all salespeople spend double that amount while the bottom 77% are actually in the 3-25% range.  The bottom 77% are there only because they score poorly when measured on 21 Sales Core Competencies.  The fact that they don't manage their time well either simply compounds the problem.

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I am always honored when my work is recognized and this year is no exception.  The judges at Top Sales Awards named Objective Management Group (OMG) the Top Sales Assessment Tool for 2016.  That marks the 6th consecutive year that OMG has won the Gold!  We believe that we have developed the best Sales Assessment tools in the world but it is gratifying when others validate that belief for us!   It's also nice to receive recognition for my personal content.  The judges awarded my Blog, Understanding the Sales Force, with a Bronze medal for Top Sales & Marketing Blog of 2016.  That marks the 6th consecutive year that my Blog has earned a medal.  In addition, this article won the Bronze for Top Sales & Marketing Blog Post.  Will Barron interviewed me earlier this year and that particular podcast won a Gold Medal for Top Sales & Marketing Podcast. Finally, a Webinar I did earlier in the year on How to Sell value won a Gold Medal for Top Sales & Marketing Webinar.  I would like to thank the judges and congratulate all of my colleagues in the sales training and consulting space who also won awards.  A very nice way to end 2016!

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Millennials are more independent, more spoiled, have a shorter attention span, tend to be more into their technology than into people, don't like working traditional hours, and don't enjoy working in traditional ways.  That said, would you expect them to be better or worse suited for selling than the generations who came before them?

I took to the data to see what story it might tell. I found data on more than 43,000 millennials in sales and here is what I learned.  This information should be very helpful for hiring new salespeople and developing them as well.

To get a sense for the actual comparison, I looked at four data sets:

1. All Millennials
2. The Top 10% of Millennials
3. The Top 10% of Salespeople with 10+ years in sales and in their industry
4. All Salespeople with 10+ years in sales and in their industry

So how do Millennials compare?  

Chris Mott, my trusted colleague and friend, specified the first dashboard - how all millennials scored. Sales Quotient, the overall score, is shown in the top right corner.  108 is weak.  Sales DNA, the combination of strengths, is shown in the middle.  61 represents a salesperson that will not be able to execute sales process, strategies, skills and tactics because the strengths are actually weaknesses.  Commitment, the willingness to do what it takes to achieve greater success in sales is shown in the upper left hand section.  53% represents a lack of commitment.  You'll notice that Handling Rejection and Relationship Building are the only two areas where millennials scored well in the areas of Sales DNA and Selling Competencies.  Scroll down for more.

After Chris showed me the first dashboard, I populated the next dashboard with veteran salespeople with 10 or more years in sales.  You can see that as a group, they have higher scores in all of the areas we discussed relative to the previous dashboard, except - and this is a head turner - Relationship Building!  Who could have seen that coming?  Interestingly, they score 39% on Responsibility which means they are twice more likely to make excuses than their younger colleagues.  In this comparison, based on their Sales Quotients, the older salespeople are at least serviceable while the Millennials are simply weak.  Scroll down for more.

The third dashboard represents veteran salespeople again, but this time only the top 10%.  As you can see, the top 10% are elite, with Sales Quotients averaging 142 and Sales DNA averaging 83.  Nearly every score is in the green and all of the scores are higher than either of the two prior groups.  These are the salespeople you want to hire!  And wherever possible, you want to coach up your existing salespeople to be like the top 10%.  Scroll down for more.

The fourth dashboard represents the Top 10% of Millennials.  It isn't very different from the top 10% of Veteran Salespeople with the notable exception of their respective scores for Figure-it-Out-Factor, or how quickly they will ramp up.  Notice the low score on Relationship Building!  This group scores the highest on Desire, Responsibility, Outlook, Sales DNA and Coachable!!  Scroll down for more.

It should be clear from this comparison that overall, Millennials are not a great choice for sales.  However, the Top 10% of Millennials are an excellent choice for sales!  So the million dollar question is, when you are hiring salespeople, and millennials are in the mix, how do you determine whether they are millennials of the 108 Sales Quotient or of the 143 Sales Quotient?

I apologize.  That was a trick question. As you can see from the dashboard of all Veteran salespeople, that group only averages a 121 on Sales Quotient. It shouldn't matter whether millennials are in the mix or not. You need the ability to differentiate between the 140's, 120's and 100's with every candidate, and do it as early in the sales recruiting process as possible.  Weed out the undesirable sales candidates in the very first step!  So how can you tell whether you have a 140 or a 108?  Use Objective Management Group's accurate and predictive sales candidate assessments. They're built on science and customizable for your business and selling role.  

In the old days, after speaking at a conference, I would frequently be told that I was the top-rated speaker at the event.  More recently, people have told me that I "Rocked!"  One time, as I was being introduced, an audience member came up to me and said, "Don't Suck!"  We can't always be rock stars...

I apologize if it sounded like I was bragging.  I didn't mean to.  I was just looking for contrast.  For example, the great rockers of the last 50 years - the Stones, the Beatles and the Dead - now THEY have FANS!  But even those three groups pale in comparison to the original rocker.  No, not Elvis.  Interestingly, I had to go 8 pages deep in a Google search for Rock Star before there was even a mention of anyone remotely connected to being a rock star.  That's when Joe Perry of Aerosmith was mentioned in the Google web search.  Jack Black in his School of Rock role was the first "rocker" shown in the Google image search!  Not quite what I had in mind - no offense to Aerosmith and Jack Black fans...

The greatest of all time to rock would be God.  Who else could have His word in such a huge collection of books written over so many centuries, all while performing miracles?  Who else could have so many devotees?  I know.  I just broke the biggest unwritten (maybe it's actually been written) business rule of all time.  "Don't talk about religion."  Well, fuck that!  If you're one of the readers that usually shares my articles and this paragraph is making you uncomfortable, stop reading right now and don't share the article with anyone.  On the other hand, if you are OK with this paragraph and you would be OK allowing a little more God into our increasingly Godless lives, share to your heart's content.  I was just looking for some more contrast.

Back to speakers and then, finally, onto salespeople.

You've attended conferences and for every speaker that rocked, there were 3 that were so-so and 2 that absolutely sucked.  As a group, do you think that salespeople, and specifically you and/or your salespeople, are any different from speakers?  Do you think that all of your salespeople rock all of their sales calls?  Do some of them rock some of the time?  Do any of them EVER rock?  Let's explore a few of the characteristics of salespeople that really rock.

Salespeople who rock have mastered the following ten competencies:

1. Animated - This is not just visual animation, like constant movement, but it's also vocal animation, one's ability to reach out with inflection and instantly grab people's attention and keep that attention for the remainder of the meeting.
   
   
2. Memorable - While this tends to be an outcome, the ability to stand apart and differentiate from everyone else is the quality that is most important for being memorable.  Being animated helps, being likable is important, but the ability to stand out from the crowd is most important.
   
   
3. Subject Matter Experts - This is more than being an expert about products and services.  This is about being an expert on application, your industry, your vertical, your market, on process, on your target customer's role and with cost justifications and ROI calculations.
    
4. Know the Audience - A salesperson must not only connect with a prospect on a personal level, but they must also know their problems, challenges, frustrations, goals and objectives.  A salesperson should understand the personal impact that these issues have on the prospect.  To rock even more, a presentation should be tailored and customized to address what a salesperson has learned about the audience. I was a guest on Evan Carmichael's radio show last week talking about this very thing at the 18-minute mark.
    
5. Ask Great Opening Questions - Assuming that salespeople have and use consultative selling skills to have great and meaningful conversations (see this post for more), then the quality and depth of those conversations are in direct proportion to the opening questions they ask.
   
   
6. Push Back - Polite and passive salespeople are nice to meet.  However, they are not memorable because they fail to differentiate themselves in a meaningful way.  From time to time, it's important to challenge outdated thinking, push back on a questionable approach or question a decision that might not be in everyone's best interest.  Polite and passive salespeople will struggle mightily with this.
   
   
7. Great Sense of Humor - I am coaching a salesperson who is always too serious.  This caused his prospects to feel threatened, pressured and as a result, they would get defensive.  They just didn't find him likable enough!  Having the ability to detect the moments where it would be useful to lighten things up by using humor makes salespeople more likable and keeps the pressure from mounting.
   
   
8. Presence - When a salesperson is well-dressed, six-feet tall, graying around the temples and has a voice like James Earl Jones, it's hard not to have presence.  But the rest of us need to work at it.  You might not be in an industry or calling on a vertical where your wardrobe can help.  You might not have a great voice.  You might be short like me.  Wisdom may not have appeared in your hair color.  So you make up for these physical shortcomings with pace, confidence, good listening, and a philosophy of less is more.  When you do speak, you should be the voice of wisdom.  Your contribution to the conversation must be significant, unexpected, articulate, relevant, and when possible, profound.
   
   
9. Concise - Being concise will certainly enhance your presence, but one must strive for concise in all circumstances.  No rambling, unnecessary details, complicated demonstrations, or overblown explanations.  When it comes to a presentation, less is always more.
   
   
10. Close - Salespeople must know when to close.  This doesn't vary and it's not after X number of minutes, calls, meetings or questions.  It's not after a demo, presentation or proposal either.  It's when all required milestones within the sales cycle have been achieved. Final Milestone achievement can occur after one day or one year, one call or ten calls, one demo or five demos, after meeting with one person or twenty people.  It's milestone-specific, not time- or quantity-specific.  And when it's been completed, it's closing time.  This point in time is the first and best opportunity for closing and salespeople must be able to get the deal closed when this opportunity finally presents itself. 

All salespeople have the potential to rock, but they may not have all of these competencies mastered.  They can be taught and they can adapt.  I'm certain that when I was younger, the only one of these competencies I had was a sense of humor.  And if I was in front of an audience, then my sense of humor would have been buried beneath layers of fear.  But at some point, I was inspired.  I believe it was by God.  And I believe that you and your salespeople can be inspired to master all ten of these competencies. 

I don't want you to miss the big one here.  It's the biggest secret of all.  Inspiration.  When you are inspired, you rock.  When you inspire others, you rock!

Would you like to be more successful identifying salespeople that rock?