The Mindset of the “A” Players in Sales

In today’s ever changing business climate, one of the critical areas I coach salespeople, sales management and leadership on, is the view that “time as capital” can be the best way to drive the right results with the lowest investments. Everyone wants to get deep into the deals where they ether have or can build competitive advantage. However the current high-pressure business climate that many firms operate under can also cause a current quarter or next quarter horizon view in terms of account engagement and deal development. These realities often lead to a desire to have a long list of opportunities in the pipeline to show that progress and traction are being created. However when we often dig into each deal as part of our sales transformation work, we often see an overly optimistic view on many of these opportunities.

This often leads to a question from sales management or leadership about what are the top members of the sales team doing to get a higher close rate and more deals moving in the process. The answer is the best sales people are actually focused on knocking deals out of the pipeline rather than filling it. This may sound counterintuitive but it is a distinguishing characteristic of “A” players in the professional services sales side of the business. The logic of this is also based on two critical realities in our time compressed business environment. You have to always be selling in two directions, one internally to your support team and connected members as well as externally to clients. A salesperson cannot get tagged with a reputation of having a lot of deals but very few moving or maturing into actual business.  

Since those of us in sales are dependent on our support and delivery teams we have to remember that they can always be doing something else that they are measured on than rather than speaking to you about your deals. This is important due to the limited time our prospects and clients actually have to speak to us and their expected response time. If you look at the past six months in most cases you will see that your prospect and client meetings about new business tend to fall on to midweek. So when you look at it in detail you really only have about 15 hours per week where you can actually connect one to one with prospects and clients. How you “invest” those hours really determines how your numbers look in the end. In reality all of us in sales are really venture capitalists but our capital is time and not currency. In most cases time is more valuable because you can't buy, borrow, beg, steal or create time; it is a fixed asset and customer interest and opportunities can age very quickly.

How do the A Players approach a deal and how do they actually qualify the opportunities they encounter? It really starts with a different mindset that is focused on finding out about the details of the potential opportunity. When I train sales people and managers one of the questions I ask very early in the opening remarks is “In your day to day sales efforts what is more important to you a “yes” or a “no”. I usually get all types of answers until someone asks me what is the right answer. My response is in every sales conversation someone buys and someone sells. In that question I just asked, almost everyone “buys” that when I mention “no” it is “no” rather than “know”. If you look back at your big wins the deciding factor is usually not price, it is that you “knew” more about the opportunity than the competition. You will find that A Players are always focused on learning and knowing more about the company, sponsors and the opportunity to gage if this situation warrants further investment of their time and personnel resources.

A Players also ask questions that often many sales people miss or are afraid to ask; I will cover that in my next post.