Sales Reps: Have you ever wondered what top performing sales reps do differently, that you can implement to get better results?
Sales Leaders, Managers and Enablers: Of all the possible sales behaviors you can emphasize, would it be helpful to know where to focus your organizational performance improvement efforts (training, coaching, reinforcement) to “move the middle” and raise your overall sales effectiveness and results?
That’s what we’ll discuss in this post on The 6 Moments of Truth for Sales Effectiveness.
The 80/20 rule, also known as The Pareto Principle, declares that 80 percent of outcomes are derived from 20 percent of the efforts.
While the numbers (80/20) may not always be exact, using this concept encourages you to foster efficiency and increase effectiveness by focusing on the things that truly drive your results. The difficulty lies in being able to determine where to focus your efforts – or which behaviors are the 20% that will produce 80% of your results.
Over the past 16 years of conducting top producer analyses in a variety of B2B sales environments, I’ve seen several themes consistently arise that separate the top producers from the rest.
In a presentation at ATD’s 2014 conference, I shared my work with the top 4% of those top producers.
When you study the Top 4%, it’s typically with the goal of hiring more like them, because it’s often very difficult to replicate what they do across a sales force.
The remaining 16% of the Top 20%, however, are still far-above-average performers and what they do can usually be replicated by the middle performers below them, to really move the needle.
In the presentation, despite the difficulty in replicating, I shared what I learned from these Top 4-Percenters, and discussed how you can train some of it. What these incredible performers excelled at, which vastly differentiated them from the rest of their peers, surprised many – especially since “selling skills” weren’t called out, specifically.
Two years later, in 2016 at the ATD conference, I published my process for conducting Top Producer Analysis effectively. In this presentation, however, I only shared the process and did not share what I learned from studying “The 16-Percenters” (the remaining 16% of the Top 20%).
Now, in 2017, I’m starting to share more of what these top performers do, as I launch an adaptive sales methodology that I’ve based on their behaviors. In addition to their ability to adapt, the other things I’ve learned are behaviors that almost any sales person or sales force can use to improve their performance in six key areas. I call these behaviors “The 6 Moments of Truth for Sales Effectiveness,” and they are the 20% of things you can do in each area to drive 80% of your results.
In the next post, we’ll begin to discuss the 6 moments, one-by-one, to call out the key differentiators in each that you can use to improve sales performance.
