Traits of Top Performers

A friend of mine, Julian Lebray, who’s a bit of a sales winner sent me some analysis yesterday.  Unfortunately he supports Man City, but leaving that aside, his firm’s training company investigated why the best sales guys were the best.  They came up with the two different types of approaches used by winners and also-rans:

Top Performers	Average Performers
Plan Questions	Plan Presentations
Concentrate on large strategic deals	Go for Quick hits
Use different strategies for different competitors	One strategy does it all
Get down to business quickly	Spend a lot of time chattering
Questions have impact	Questions have less relevance or direction
Hold back from giving service details early in the sale	Jumps in early in the sale with presentations/descriptions
Does not talk about capabilities unless they have importance to the customer	Dumps service features and capabilities on customers
Ends the call by agreeing on “next steps” and Joint action plans	Calls often end with no actions agreed

I must say that although for many, this doesn’t say anything radically new, I like it as in every sales situation, do you always nail each of the 8 above correctly?  The answer is probably not, so well worth taking on board in this framework.