Attitude Rules OK!
It’s often been said that salespeople need three components to thrive – knowledge, skills and attitude. We’re all guilty of focussing far too much time and energy on the first two – knowledge and skills, neglecting the pursuit of the right attitudes. All three oil the gears of a top performing salesperson, but attitude is the highest grade oil.
Attitude is the most important attribute of top performing salespeople, without doubt but the wrong attitude can be heavily damaging.
Here are 9 attitudes that all top performing salespeople share.
Determination
Determined sales people get what they want and they refuse to accept defeat. Determination was made famous by Thomas Edison – the inventor of the light bulb and many other creations. Edison was celebrated for making thousands of attempts before achieving success. He was quoted “When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead with it and make trial after trial until it comes”
Assertiveness
Assertiveness in a salesperson, means being proactive and not reacting to events. Having a plan and driving towards this. Assertive salespeople make their presence felt and thrive on competition ultimately producing results.
Responsibility
Motivated salespeople take responsibility for everything – their own business, their results, their successes, their failures. They accept responsibility for errors, no blame and no excuses – they see their mistakes and correct them moving forward. They also accept success and know how to celebrate and bottle this.
Inner Strength
Inner strength means to be able to recover from setbacks, knock downs and other events that cause most people to stall. “What’s the worse that can happen?” is a question they might ask themselves as they quickly recover, shake off the dust and pull themselves together. Inner Strength is all about handling the self dialogue that dominates all salespeople, the nagging voice that can put you down. Motivated high performers learn to cope with these voices and channel them towards ambition, quickly putting the past behind them.
Inner Desire
Top performers have an innate Inner Desire to achieve their goals. Firstly they set goals, turning them into compelling outcomes with strategic next actions littering their direction. Moving on their goals, they generate their own energy. Either gaining motivation from external sources or, more commonly from within themselves – their internal burner. Many salespeople adopt mental rehearsal techniques taken from sports psychology, and this allows them to practice the future before it happens giving them further inner desire to win.
Self Confidence
Top performing salespeople have confidence in their own abilities, they never doubt. However they are not arrogant or obnoxious, just confident – there’s a fine line and they don’t cross it. They just know they are capable of achieving their goals.
Trust
Top performing salespeople ooze trust. In others – particularly their teams that support them. They communicate well with their teams, often motivational and encouraging to others. They are good delegators to their support teams and use them appropriately.
Influencers
Top performers have a range of influencing styles that they can flex to suit the occasion. Both pull and push style influencing is used. They like to influence, find it easy and take control of situations which require control.
Coach’ability
Salespeople that reach the top and remain so, enjoy and relish coaching from a sales manager. They are good at being coached, are willing and receptive to the words of a quality coach. They know how to accept feedback, quickly eliminating criticism in their minds as constructive guidance. They either accept or reject the feedback and then act on it quickly and decisively…and move forward. They don’t dwell on it. Today is another day and my goals drive me forward.
Here’s an 8 minute recording of Paul reading the article.
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