Description - Personal Characteristics

Description

There are many myths in sales for what it takes to be a success. Having no real basis for analysis reps are left with rumors and unfounded assumptions. A few examples are the opposite pairs like introvert / extrovert, beautiful / ugly, smart / dumb and so on. If these were true required factors sales results would prove them. In fact these factors may be advantageous but not sufficient to achieve desirable outcomes.

Transcription

There’s an ongoing debate in sales on introvert versus extrovert. And if you ask a hundred people, they’re all extrovert. You have to be a people person. You have to go out there and talk it up, you know, meet people and chat them up. And introverts, you know, there’s in their own little shell, you know, they, they don’t like people that much, you know, they don’t feel comfortable around crowds.

So after building 145 sales teams and recruiting, training, and managing over 20, 000 reps, One at a time, okay? Here’s what I discovered. I discovered that it’s completely irrelevant. I’ve had top reps that are miserable, introverted, bad attitude, whatever you want to call it. And, you know, they sit at their desks and they just crank out the calls, they talk soft, and they just walk through the sales process and they turn in the deals.

And I’ve seen just crazy out, you know, outbound extroverted reps and some of those got really good sales. And so I’m always hiring and I’m saying, well, which kind of personnel am I looking for? And the result was, I have no idea. The best way to find out is just to put the rep on the team, see what he does, and you’ll find the truth.

There’s other characteristics, like intelligence. Well, being intelligent may be advantageous, and maybe not. If you’re dealing with highly complex situations, or if you’re talking to engineers and scientists, then being intelligent might be an advantage. On the other hand, being intelligent gives you a chance to talk to yourselves out of deals, over explain, talk too much, can be real negative.

So again, which one would I want to hire? I don’t know. Put them on a team and see what they can do, you know. Uh, if you’re selling AI software, maybe, you know, the IT might have a more bigger of a factor, but most people aren’t selling AI software.

So, what other kind of personality do you have? How about age? A young person may be supposedly more ambitious, ready to set the world on fire, and an older person may be kind of sitting back and want to take it easy more. So, which one would I want to hire? And the answer is, I don’t know. Put him in a team and find out.

It’s because the guy’s young doesn’t mean he’s going to do anything. You know? And it’s because the person’s older and has a lot of so called experience. It means nothing. It means nothing. So, intelligence, age, uh, you know, sex, let’s talk about sex, no we can’t do that. Let’s talk about, uh, gender, in general.

Is a female better than a male? I don’t know. Put them on a team, let’s find out, because I’ve had really great female reps and really lousy female reps. And same thing with male reps. I don’t really see a lot of correlation there. The only correlation I’ve ever found is that the person has to be driven to succeed, smart enough to do the job, and work real hard, and know how to close.

And I believe they’ll find a way to make the deal happen. We’ve covered this before, but how about attitude, demeanor, you know? Is he a rah rah coach or is it, you know, someone who’s sitting on the sidelines? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Okay, so if you’re in any one of these categories, you cannot use that characteristic as an excuse to not sell or to sell.

It adds up to a big zero. Okay? So I had a rep on my team, uh, at Legal Match, which is a lawyer referral business that I was involved with. And I was interviewing this one lady and she came in and she was, uh, worked at a non profit. Oh, great. Can’t go to a non profit. And she was going to law school. Oh, geez.

You know, over analytical, elitist, right? And so I talked to her for a while and the thing is, I always need, you know, good reps on a team. And I said, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen and I pushed my really happy I did is that I decided let’s find out I said look I’m gonna give you a chance in the team and there’s no, you know quotas or anything like that Just sell or don’t sell.

She ended up being one of my top 10 reps She was, and I don’t know that, but she was on the phone. She had lawyers on the phone for six hours, hour after hour Chatting them up, talking about this or that Just the opposite of what I would train. I’d say, you know, get, get the deal done and get off the phone.

Don’t be screwing around. A lawyer, lawyer’s time is valuable. And I would cringe. I’d walk by, she’s chatting him up. She’d make, she’d look like, I gotta go have dinner. I’ll call you back in an hour. And the lawyer would say, okay, okay. Experience. I’ve had some reps with 10, 20, 30 years experience and they call themselves Top Guns.

And I had some people just fresh out of college. And my philosophy is, I don’t know, I’ll put them on a team and see what they can do. So the experienced guys, in general, most of them didn’t work. They couldn’t transition and adapt. And they were too elitist, they know everything, you can’t train them. Okay?

The young guys, on the other hand, were all ready to set the world on fire. They knew nothing and they knew they knew nothing. So they were willing to learn. So one of the top reps on my team, let’s call him John, John came in and he was a go getter. He was as ambitious. He would take notes when I talk. I thought that was pretty funny.

Uh, if he, he learned, he just come back and ask questions. He’d go on the phone, he’d make calls. He ended up being in the top 10 reps of my team and a lot of people may not have hired him because, well, you don’t have enough experience. Okay. After that project, he went on to a sales force. And he said, I called him and I thought, I’m making 300, 000 a year at this company.

And they trained me. I was completely useless. They didn’t know anything about training. So I sat there, pretend I was interested, blah, blah. And then I did exactly. What we did, what you taught me, and I rapidly became the number one rabbit. It’s not the first time. It’s two other people that exactly the same thing, exactly the same company.

They quickly rose through the ranks because these big companies, they’re, they’re mainly teaching product. They have some rote learning on sales. They don’t understand, believe it or not, they don’t understand sales. Okay. They’re technically technical guys. So, you know, uh, and let alone, I’ve had people coming in from different countries.

And you say, well, maybe there’s a disadvantage because they don’t, you know, understand the culture. What does that have to do with anything? America has people from 200 different countries here. We’re all from somewhere, okay? All I got to know is that the people who came in were typically much more motivated because they don’t have a lot of options.

I gave them a chance. And they, you know, they come over here, they could die here. They could end up in a box and be overpassed, okay? And so they work really hard. And the accent and the language didn’t really matter because, again, people now in the U. S. are from everywhere. Everybody has an accent. You know, there’s some guy from the Philippines, where there’s a People are much more amenable to talking to people with a different accent.

So many people from India Are in the U. S. now working, okay, and being huge successes, by the way, okay. So, ethnicity, background, and, you know, other characteristics that I’m not going to go into, because it doesn’t matter, no matter what characteristics you can present, I will tell you the same thing, it doesn’t matter.

I’ve seen, you know, It’s all an internal thing. Does that person want to succeed? Better yet, do they have to succeed? They must succeed. The house, the wife, the kids, you know what I mean? College payments, 1, 200 a month, car payment for a Hellcat. You know, they, uh, they need to succeed. Okay? So, if you think you have a disadvantage because of any of these characteristics, you’re wrong.

And you think you have an advantage because of any of these characteristics, you’re wrong. Okay? And that’s how that works.