The Sales Outliers

Meet the Unique Players in the Selling Game

What does a Sales Outlier track in their mind to take command of the sales conversation that average salespeople don’t?

Did you ever wonder how the elite in your field do what they do? Ever since I began to explore the world of NLP and coaching, I have been intrigued by the idea of modeling what experts do to get great results and excel in their field.

So how do they do what they do?

If I learned one thing from reading countless books in the field, here it is; to achieve excellence you have to find out how somebody does what they do, how they think about their experience, and how they execute their strategy. It prompted me to dig into the world of selling and uncover what the top salespeople do.

Looking for Patterns

The questions I asked myself over and over again, as I observed patterns of success in the people I met in the sales world, were some of the following:

What do top salespeople do that other sales professionals don’t?

What is the pattern that makes people successful in sales meetings?

What pieces of psychology are we missing in selling?

Is it possible to design and create sales conversations to get better sales results?

Do we need to pay more attention to language and mindset when learning how to sell?

Who is doing this really well and how can other salespeople harness these behaviors and mindset?”

I always knew selling had a structure. So, I took a blank piece of paper and started to map out what goes on in a sales meeting when a buyer and a seller come together. I asked myself more key questions like these:

How do a buyer and seller converse to move the conversation towards a deal?

What do they think about during the conversation?

How do the best salespeople get the decision going in their favor?

What are the triggers that bring the sale over the line?

It was almost a case of splicing and dicing conversations and behaviors to get to the core of what really makes the sale and what was really going on inside the sales conversations.

The Patterns Reveal Themselves

Selling is not just about making the call, getting the lead into the pipeline, having the meeting, handling objections, and winning the deal. This is really the sales pipeline process. The process will not get the deal.

A great sales process is not going to win the sale if you don’t know how to create and replicate effective, high-quality sales conversations.

I am more inclined to ask about the sales conversation process and the buyer’s decision-making process when figuring out where a company needs some upskilling in its sales team. This always tells me how well a salesperson is doing and where the gaps for coaching and training are. This is where the real gold is in improving sales results.

Language and Semantics are at the Heart of Great Selling

In exploring selling behaviors, I began to realize that language and semantics (the meaning we give to experience) played a big part in how well a salesperson did. It wasn’t just what they said to their buyers. It was also down to how they mapped their world of selling, how they talked to themselves internally, and the levels of meaning they gave to everything they experienced. I then came to the conclusion that the HOW of the WHAT of Selling was where people needed more clarity and skills.

It was not really about the steps, but the buying experience and how to systematically create it consistently for buyers.

This is what most people, even the best salespeople and sales managers, are not always consciously able to duplicate among the hired sales staff.

Once I mapped it out, I started sharing it with clients who were looking to change the selling behaviors in their sales teams and learn more about how they conversed with clients, and then track the results. The training and coaching then became about teaching a mindset, mapping conversation strategies, and bringing more awareness to their selling and behaviors in a sales conversation with each of their buyers.

Observing the change in their understanding showed me that salespeople were not always conscious of how they communicated to their buyers and as a result, they may have been leaving some significant deals on the table.

Of course, we cannot win all the deals, but there are always some that get left on the table because of the nature and quality of the conversation between the buyer and the seller.

Finding People who are Top of their Selling Game

Not content to rest on what I had learned from experimenting and researching myself, I went in search of salespeople who had a reputation for being top of their selling game. I interviewed top salespeople across a broad section of industries and countries to find out what the top salespeople did every time they had a conversation with a buyer. They were truly impressive!

In talking to these exceptional people, I was looking for a common theme; something that told me they were doing something consistently and different that generated tremendous results in their sales activity, day after day. They were using a different compass that set them apart from average. I discovered some traits and strategies that make them unique in their field. And it confirmed what I had been sharing with clients. They had a solid, consistent sales mindset, and structured repeatable conversation patterns. This always gave them better results than their competitors. I call these people Sales Outliers.

So what is an Outlier and What Makes them Different?

out.li.er- 1: something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body. 2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from others in the sample

In figuring out what makes these people top of their game I asked many questions about their beliefs on selling, money, their products, their thinking, their emotions while in a sales meeting, what they noticed about themselves in the selling scenarios, and how they knew what to do when with whom and where and most importantly why they did what they did. And there were consistent patterns and themes in their answers.

I learned that this group of sales professionals is self-defining. They are the cream of the crop in their selling game. They consistently exceed their targets. They are rewarded for their skills and know-how in winning new business and clients, quarter after quarter.