The holy grail in sales is getting salespeople to become fearless. Traditional sales training is great at teaching process but is ill equipped to transform a salesperson’s mindset. Watch this 6 min video to discover why mastering the 5th element (mindset) is critical to sales success.
(Video Transcript)
Hello everyone my name is Umar Hameed. I want to share an idea with you. The way I see it there are five critical things you need to know that will radically change the way you think about sales performance. And how you improve performance of individuals and of team members.
Number one, is sales process. A few months ago, I was doing a presentation to a large group of sales managers and asked them this question.
Plus or minus, this is the sales process:
You need to:
- Get an appointment
- Do the presentation
- Handle objections
You need to close the deal and then you need to go deeper into the accounting, get referrals outside of the company
The manager said, “Yes, that’s plus minus that’s what it is.”
Here is the question I asked them, ‘Where in the sales process do your sales people struggle most and what is the impact on their performance. How much money is being on the table?’
Two things tied for first place. Not getting enough appointments and being weak at closing the deal.
When I asked, “What’s the financial impact?” They said, “Well salespeople are leaving about 40 to 50% of their revenue potential on the table if they have a weakness in any areas and the sales process.
Idea no. 1
The first thing we need to understand is, there’s no such thing as a perfect salesperson. There is always an area where even the best salespeople feel stuck or they hesitate that causes a negative impact on their earning potential.
Idea no. 2
Idea number two. At another conference, I was talking to a large group of sales people and I asked them this question. “ What if the world’s best sales trainer came into town?, and 100 sales people from all different companies; large companies, small solo operators, everybody went in their wallet and took a $1000 out to be in the presence of the master.
The master delivered great content that was entertaining, was phenomenal in every way”. When people go back to work on the following Monday, how many people set the world on fire. What I typically hear back is this, maybe 2% of people totally change the way they do things and radically improve their performance?
I said okay. How many people would brag about the training? Would take selfies with the master, be so excited, and go back to work on Monday and not change a single thing. What I hear back is well maybe 60% maybe 70% of sales people wouldn’t change anything.
Then I said, “Would it be fair to say that the remaining salespeople would change a few things and very quickly they would go back revert back to their old behaviors” and they say, “Yes.”
The main question is, ‘why isn’t the sales training as effective as we think it is?’
Idea no. 3
The third idea we need to talk about is just the pure numbers. It turns out in the U.S. we have 18 million sales people but only 59% of them are making quota. And in the US we spent $7.8B a year on sales training. And there’s a company called, YES Research and they find that sales training fades very quickly. We train our salespeople but it doesn’t stick and the question is, “Why not?”
Idea no. 4
Idea number 4, segmentation. It turns out that in any sales team you have three groups of players. The first group of the A players. There are not too many of them but they walk on water do amazing things in sales. They can generate anywhere from 30 to 40% of the entire company’s revenue.
Then you’ve got to B players who do good work but never achieve greatness. We’re glad that they are here but when the managers look at them they go, “If Judy could just change this one little behavior she could become an A player. We invest a ton in training in coaching to help her improve. But that doesn’t work often enough.” Or we have Jack who’s doing well but something is getting in the way. If we could help him get unstuck He would become an A player. We focus a lot of attention on the B players to make them A players. But this does not work.
Then the last group are the C players. These people are dead weight and should be gone but we hold onto them.
We invest in training, motivation and incentives is to get more A players. If we get more A players we radically improve our sales team and we beat the daylights out of our competition.
Idea no. 5 The Missing Link
Idea number five, the missing link. Well, it turns out the missing link is our mindset.
Our salespeople are driven to achieve. They want to do better. Our sales managers and CEOs investing in training, tools and technology to make our salespeople do better. We want them to improve, they want to improve but they’re not improving in the way that we want.
Why does this happen?
It turns out it’s our mindset. What we need is mind training not more sales training. This is my mission in life. How can we bring tools from the world of NLP and neuroscience and apply it to salespeople to teach them how to break through their barriers. So they get dramatically better results.
I mean just think about it. If you had a salesperson that could close 10% better it would be huge for the company right? That 10% isn’t about process, it’s about mindset.
What if you get a salesperson that could actually get you 10 additional meetings a month? It would be huge for the company. What stops them from doing that? It’s mindset.
I want to teach you a deeper understanding of how human beings work. More importantly how to get salespeople to break through their mental blocks using simple and elegant tools. I`ve written a book called Unlock Your Sales Potential. Click on the link below, And I`ll send you a copy of my audio book. In this 90 minute audio book you will get a deeper understanding of how salespeople work? What gets them stuck and more importantly how we get unstuck.
Just imagine all that investment in training dollars that you’ve already made in your organization. With a better mindset they’ll be able to use it in a more effectively. Your salespeople will be stronger and faster which will impact your revenue in a significant way.
I hope you enjoyed this presentation. Check out my audio book and if you’d like to have a conversation please reach out to me. I’d love to talk to you about improving your sales force.
