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5 Key Personal Strengths of Top Sales Performers

By: Harry White

To recruit a good sales person, you really can't allow yourself to be led by your gut instinct or your feeling about them. Once you've got a salesperson it's common to give them 3, 6 or even 12 months to prove themselves before you make the tough decision to let them go again. Many smarter companies have wised up to this -- they use some form of psychometric testing (affordable for any business), to weed out the chaff and only get the natural born winners to drive your revenue growth through the roof.

This article outlines the key behaviours that top performers share. People with these traits will form the top 20% of sales people in any profession - the strong, charismatic people who have that ability to turn in higher numbers than the rest of the pack. A statistical analysis was used to produce these results -- a deep psychological profile was completed on hundreds of top performing sales people and their results compared. By comparing the results, it was apparent that they shared the same core characteristics. Learn what these characteristics are from this paper. A series of further papers explores these characteristics in more depth.

The easiest way to handle these characteristics is to consider 5 key areas of performance for our top-flight high performance sales team, outlined below.

Strength of Character
Your mental toughness and "inner essence" or spirit are fantastic predictors of your behaviour under stress. The hard shell of the mentally tough protects them from the knock-backs and hits that are taken on the trail of big bonus payments. You cannot afford to employ the walking wounded - they won't convert prospects into customers, they'll be wall-flowers and shrinking violets in the hot-house of your company and you'll pay dearly in time and money for the mistake of thinking you can build them up. A great sales team is a tough place to live for the average person -- don't make the mistake of thinking you can "make do" or "build up" your staff - hire strong people to begin with and you'll build a team of gladiators to do battle for you. Weak sellers are often lovely people, but your business is not meant to be full of needy people - you don't have the time when there are targets to be met!

Interpersonal Skills
To be successful at selling, you've got to have a natural affinity with other people and to be comfortable with strangers. You don't want somebody who is uncomfortable with the idea of meeting new people and making new friends on a daily basis.. You need to be willing to work the room and capture every possible lead that's going from the people you meet. Good natured -- but fierce -- competition is to be encouraged in the sales force - so make sure your recruitment looks for a competitiveness that borders on aggressive at times. Make sure that mediocrity abhors your new hire and along with the other relationship traits you'll have somebody who expects to over-achieve and who will be frustrated and angry with themself if they get just average results.

Motivation & Attitudes To Work
Clearly ambitious people are going to make the best sellers for you. The perfect salesperson is going to have a fire in their belly that drives them to achieve, be organised and a planner so that they're always in control of their goals. You must also look for enough follow-through to see a plan through to successful completion, rather than giving up before they get results.} A real sense of urgency drives our perfect bionic woman to get the next sale, to make the next appointment, to close the deals. She just won't rest until the target is smashed, every single month. Fiendishly busy people make fiendishly good sellers!

Control-Freaks?!!!
High performers in almost every walk of life have some level of need to be in control. They will not quietly do their own job and ignore everybody else - they'll have an opinion about their peers and tell you what to do about them, too -- nobody said that managing high performers is meant to be easy! They'll burn bridges with the administration department and tell you that the operations department is inflexible and failing. They'll be arrogant and demanding SOB's, but worth all the hassle in the extra sales they produce. Look for low levels of deference - you want that feisty, sharp sense of being right in your sales team - not easy to manage, but you did say you wanted high sales, right?

First Impression
A crucial trait that's often missed or ignored as unimportant is the power of making a strong first impression. In the first few moments of meeting somebody, you set the tone for the next 15-20 times you'll see that person Getting it wrong may prevent a relationship from ever having the chance to form. What this means is that if you're hiring somebody to be a great salesperson, you'd better make sure that you're impressed with them from the moment you first speak to them on the phone, or when they first set foot in your office.

Lee Duncan provides business coaching to companies throughout the UK for growth and business improvement. For more information about business coaching Cambridge take a look at Lee's blog and website.

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