The Real Reason Your Sales Team Isn’t Filled with Top Performers

There is a reason that the top performers in nearly every field are the top performers. It’s not just talent or natural ability, although natural ability helps. And it’s not because of a compensation plan. Offering better incentives doesn’t improve someone’s abilities. What enables the best performers to reach peak performance is practice.

That’s an unexciting answer, I know. It requires a commitment to learning a discipline and spending considerable time honing your skills. When it comes to the performance of sales professionals, few organizations recognize this. Many executives still believe that sales success is about personality and drive. The Wall Street Journal reported in an article about the challenges facing sales organizations that “there’s a huge stereotype that sales isn’t really a career—that either anyone can do it or you’re born to it.”

As a result, there is little focus on improving sales capability beyond some occasional training as a means to gain a competitive advantage. That’s a colossal mistake.

If you want your sales team to perform at a high level and create differentiation and value in the way they sell, you need to develop a coaching culture where deliberate practice is the norm. After all, you don’t want your sales professionals, even those with experience, practicing on your best customers, do you?

The term "deliberate practice" comes from Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at my alma mater, Florida State University. Malcolm Gladwell popularized Ericsson's research on peak performance by coining the phrase “the 10,000 hour rule,” referring to a portion of the research on top musicians that indicated the average amount of practice time was 10,000 hours to reach expert level performance.

When I met with Dr. Ericsson a couple of years ago he shared with me that there was no magic in 10,000 hours and that his research was a bit misquoted. The real discovery wasn’t the amount of time it took to achieve mastery because many of the top performers he studied practiced far less than 10,000 hours. Rather, he found that there were four specific conditions related to the time these top performers spent practicing that helped them achieve their goals. They are:

1. Time must be allocated specifically for practice.

2. Practice must be guided by a teacher who knows the nuances of proper form or technique.

3. Precise feedback is given on skill development.

4. New skills are built on and integrated in further practice.

If you want to learn more about how the critical skills for selling solutions are developed, you can check out this video, specifically on practice, from my new LinkedIn Learning course, Solution Selling. Thanks to LinkedIn, this video has been unlocked and is available at no cost for a limited time. I hope you find it of value, and I welcome your thoughts, reactions, and additional ideas.