The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople

I have spent a great deal of time working with high performing salespeople, and for much of my career, I was one.

“Sales” was seldom my primary role, but often it was the most crucial; it was something that I did to “advance the cause”, or “for the greater good”, or, because its what the company, in that particular stage, needed most.

It was only when “sales” became my primary function that I started to examine why I was successful when others were not. Not coincidently, it was in this latter period when my remuneration was closely tied to my revenue generating performance, that caused me to look closely at where my time was best spent, and what activities yielded the best returns. The better my performance as a salesperson, the bigger my monthly commission.

There’s a lot of different factors that affect the optimal split between salary and commission, but in my case, the remuneration arrangement was set up to be about 50% base and 50% commission – if or when I reached the sales objective. The company management and I agreed to what a “good year” would look like for them and what it would look like for me, and we set targets based on that. If I achieved their target, half of my total remuneration would be made on commission and half on base. If I achieved more than the target, I’d make even more. If I achieved less, then obviously I would make less too.

The arrangement motivated me to stay laser focused on achieving the goals - goals that I believed I could achieve if I stayed focused. I started paying attention to how I was spending my time, and what activities had the best payback for me. Looking back over that period, here are the five areas of activities that I focused on - which are the same five areas that I see all high performing salespeople spend their time on. They are:

1)     Prospecting

2)     Cultivation

3)     Proposals

4)     Closing

5)     Fulfillment

Any time spent on anything out of these 5 areas of activity is a distraction to them and a waste of their time, energy and effort.

Of the 5 areas of activities, the highest value are activities 3 and 4: proposals and closing. The next highest value area of activity is 2, cultivation.

Of these 5 activities, 1 (prospecting) and 5 (fulfillment) are important, but not as important for the salesperson as 2 (cultivation), 3 (proposals) and 4 (closing).

Activities 1 (prospecting) and 5 (fulfillment) need to be done with the support of, or in the support of, other functional areas of the company, namely “marketing” and “customer care”. But, activities 2 (cultivation), 3 (proposals) and 4 (closing) are the primary responsibility of the salesperson. These are also the areas that the salesperson is better equipped and suited for than anyone else. This is where their highest value is.

The best performing salespeople I have encountered excel in those 3 areas: cultivating, proposals and closing. The salespeople that deliver the most phenomenal results (for themselves and the companies they work for) also have great, synergistic support and systems for the other areas - prospecting (marketing department) and fulfillment (customer care or project managers).

At the risk of sounding repetitive, its critical to understand where salespeople add most value and where they should be spending their time. Their prime time needs to be in areas 2, 3 and 4, with some collaborative support and collaboration in area 1 and 5.

Tasking them with things outside of these five areas greatly reduces their effectiveness and chance for success.

In the next few weeks, I will be delving deeper into each one of the 5 areas of activities that successful salespeople do: how they prospect effectively, how they cultivate prospects into potential and winnable opportunities, how they develop, navigate and even leverage the proposal process, and how they close. The fulfillment stage is key and will be covered too, but to the remuneration driven salesman, it is closely tied to their prospecting and cultivating activities.

Stay tuned.

If one of your company’s goals is to “grow sales”, marketing is important, and processes and systems are important, but sales skills, instinct and acumen, are the most important. I have yet to see a company achieve immediate or significant sales growth just by putting in a new CRM or instituting a new funnel sales process – although I have seen many that have tried.

“Sales” is still a person-to-person activity. It does require discipline, dedication, and a commitment to the customers’ success, but what differentiates high performing salespeople from the rest is their habits, their instincts, their vision, their listening skills, their empathy and their opportunity navigation skill.

These can be taught, learned, and developed, and that’s what this series aims to do. However, if you want to accelerate your team’s ability to make more sales and bring in more of the right kind of sales, reach out to paul@tpi-3.ca to set up a quick discovery conversation.

Here's a link to the 2nd installment, on Effective Prospecting: The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Effective Prospecting