What It Takes to Perform

As of the writing of this book, Andrew Bynum had just been released from the Cleveland Cavaliers. At one point Bynum was an NBA star, rivaled at the center position by only Dwight Howard. Still, at 26 years old, he’s having trouble finding a team that will take a chance on him. Why?

“He doesn’t want to play basketball anymore,”¹ a league source told well-connected Yahoo! Sports writers Adrian Wojnarowski and Marc J. Spears. The source also said of Bynum, “He never liked it that much in the first place.”

Most of Insight Selling has been about helping sellers know what to do to succeed. People ask us all the time if we can train anyone to sell. The answer is we can train anyone, and to some extent everyone can learn, but that doesn’t mean he or she will succeed. Just because people can do something doesn’t mean they want to do it (ahem, Bynum) or even will do it.

When what to do, can do, and will do come together, then you have yourself someone likely to perform at a high level.

Organizations that want to make insight selling a part of their culture (and sellers who want to strengthen their own insight selling chops) need to know the mix of skills, knowledge, and attributes that make up a model insight seller: the person most capable and inclined to do what insight sellers do.

With a profile of the skills, knowledge, and attributes of insight sellers, organizations can do three things:

• Decide which competencies are important for their organization and which aren’t.
• Assess candidates for sales employment to identify who is most likely to succeed, who is likely to struggle, and who is destined to fail.
• Assess the existing team for training and development and place members in sales roles likely to be good fits for them.

Together, skills and knowledge are the building blocks of capability. When someone has a skill (e.g., presentation) and the right knowledge (e.g., customer, product, industry, or questions that might arise), he or she can do something.

Attributes are the tendencies, qualities, and motivations that guide whether people will do something and the baseline aptitude for whether they can do something well. Also, attributes are characteristics that people may possess that make them a good fit to succeed in a particular role. In this case, the role is insight seller. In this chapter, we focus mostly on attributes.

How We Got Here

Before we get going, it’s important to note what has informed the creation of the insight seller profile. We’ve been studying sales performance as an organizational pursuit since 2002 and as consultants and leaders in years previous. We’ve conducted research of various types across industries, including studies on how buyers buy, how sellers generate leads, what works best in growing accounts, and of course, in this book, what separates sales winners from the rest.²

In that time, we’ve formally assessed thousands of sellers through a variety of assessment instruments to understand their psychological and behavioral characteristics and tendencies and compared the results to sales performance data on individual people. We’ve trained and coached tens of thousands of sellers, getting to know them much more deeply than simply their assessment data.

We’ve worked with hundreds of client organizations, including conducting analyses and countless discussions of what their top performers look like compared with the rest. We’ve helped organizations build sales job profiles for their teams, defining the outcomes for various roles and crafting the profile of the skills, knowledge, and attributes most likely to succeed.

We’ve taken what we’ve learned throughout the years and compared it with our most recent research and observations—taking special care to understand what’s changed in the past several years—and developed the following list of attributes of insight sellers.

As you read, note the following:

• Not a comparison: Although the insight seller is sui generis, our goal was not to define the insight seller as a juxtaposition versus other types of sellers. We’ve seen one seller type compared with others in the past. It always seems these comparisons are done to show how the one seller type is superior and the others are inferior. These comparisons don’t tend to make sense and don’t typically have an honest ring.
• Common concepts, unique combination: The individual attributes that make up the insight seller are neither new nor groundbreaking. It’s the combination, however, that is unique and makes the insight seller successful. Much like baking a cake, leave out even one critical ingredient, and although everything else might be there, it doesn’t rise.
• Different organizations, different nuances: Some characteristics will be more important for some organizations than others will. For example, some sellers need to prospect and others don’t. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that most sellers must proactively set meetings to introduce potential buyers to new ideas. So commonly, prospecting is an important skill but not always.

Tendencies

1. Passion for working and selling
   1. Key points:
   2. Working: desire for professional success in general
   3. Selling: passion to succeed in selling versus other work activities^a
   4. Passion for working and selling are proven characteristics of successful sellers. When someone is passionate about anything, the likelihood of success increases compared to someone who doesn’t want to do that thing at all.
   5. Without passion for work and selling: Sellers would rather be doing something else. Those who don’t feel the passion may even put in the same amount of work of those who do, but they don’t cross the chasm between compliance and commitment. Thus, they consistently underperform compared to those sellers who hunger for success.
2. Conceptual thinking
   1. Key points:
   2. Conceives innovative ideas and selects the right strategies
   3. Sees how activities, events, and structures affect the whole
   4. Has mental discipline to think structurally and systematically
   5. Conceptual thinking is often confused as a skill. In some ways it is, as you can teach people about how innovation works, give them strategies for coming up with innovative ideas, and teach them how pieces affect the whole. Having been in the training and development fields for decades, however, we can report that when it comes to these kinds of classes, they make a difference only for people who have a natural tendency to be good at them.
   6. Without conceptual thinking: Sellers struggle to inspire with ideas, position ideas properly, facilitate the collaborative creation of ideas, craft compelling solutions, avoid implementation pitfalls, and inspire confidence that new ideas will result in the desired outcomes. In other words, without conceptual thinking, sellers struggle with insight itself.
3. Curiosity
   1. Key points:
   2. Is interested in people and situations
   3. Has a thirst for knowledge
   4. Strives to become an expert
   5. Believes in education in sales
   6. With conceptual thinking, sellers are good with knowledge. With curiosity, they seek knowledge. Insight sellers are typically well read. They know a lot—enough to be impressive to others. They don’t have to be forced to learn, or even asked to learn, because they pursue learning themselves. In sales conversations, curiosity drives a focus on the buyer. Curious sellers naturally engage learning about the clients, including needs discovery and client research, not as perfunctory parts of the selling process, but because they want to know.
   7. Without curiosity: Sellers don’t have the depth of knowledge to apply insight selling across the 3 levels of connect, convince, and collaborate. These sellers often comply with insight as a selling strategy but never commit because they aren’t drawn to knowledge itself. Also, sellers without curiosity can have difficulty with opportunity and account research, needs discovery, and listening.
4. Sense of urgency
   1. Key points:
   2. Values speed
   3. Drives to move sales forward and take action
   4. Is impatient with the status quo
   5. Has a tendency to prefer good and fast versus perfect and slow with actions
   6. They say time kills sales, and they are right. Sellers with a sense of urgency are less likely to fall victim to the law of diminishing intent, which states the more time passes before a person takes action, the less likely that action will happen at all. Buyers might get excited about innovative ideas, but the more time they spend thinking about them, the more doubt can creep in and the more other people can pick new ideas apart. Sellers with a sense of urgency don’t let time slip by unnecessarily. They have no problem urging a decision forward.
   7. Without sense of urgency: Sellers will support negative buyer behavior (such as thinking it over, putting off decisions, and comparison shopping), won’t focus on actions likely to drive best results, will be too patient, will not push for decisions, and will accept paralysis by analysis (which is particularly problematic when selling new ideas and opportunities).
5. Assertiveness
   1. Key points:
   2. Takes control and leads
   3. Takes and defends a point of view with authority
   4. Creates disruption
   5. Has a propensity to debate
   6. Is willing to prospect
   7. Inserts self into important situations without formal invitation
   8. In some ways, assertiveness is the iconic hallmark of an insight seller. Challenging and pushing back on buyer thinking, strategies, action plans, and the status quo in general is necessary for a seller to be a change agent. If sellers are to succeed with opportunity insight, it’s also necessary for them to have no problem inserting themselves wherever they can make the greatest difference—which is often in the executive suite—and meeting with buyers and referral sources they don’t yet know.
   9. Sellers who turn assertiveness into sales success tend to have strong verbal reasoning skills—they are good at using words as a basis for analysis, problem solving, and persuasion. So it’s not just that they’re willing to debate; they’re good at it.
   10. Assertiveness is also a characteristic that can get a seller into hot water by coming across as pushy, arrogant, or too self-focused. When sellers have other attributes (e.g., emotional intelligence, curiosity, and integrity) they still use their assertiveness boldly but figure out how not to repel buyers.
   11. Without assertiveness: Sellers will not create the tension and disruption required to create change. They will not be able to practice interaction insight, which requires both taking of points of view and pushing back on buyers’ thinking and perceptions and will have difficulty getting on—and staying on—buyers’ (especially executives’) radar screens.
6. Money orientation
   1. Key points:
   2. Is comfortable discussing money in general and discussing money in what others might view as big-money situations
   3. Understands how businesses make money
   4. Is motivated to maximize personal income
   5. Insight selling is a story about investment and return. Sellers who are comfortable and inclined to discuss money can make the business case for change. Just as important, insight sellers find money—meaning they seek out buyers and companies looking to make investments, and they don’t shy away from large opportunities.
   6. Numerical reasoning skill, or using numbers as a basis for analysis and problem solving, plays a big role in success here. Numerical reasoning helps with both analyzing and presenting business cases.
   7. A second part of money orientation is the seller’s personal desire to make money. It’s been well established by many studies that sellers who are most successful tend to be motivated by compensation. For example, a recent study by University of Virginia professor Thomas Steenburgh and University of Houston professor Michael Ahearne found that no caps on pay and overachievement commissions boosted star performers’ results in tests by 9 percent and 17 percent, respectively.³
   8. Without money orientation: Sellers have difficulty qualifying prospects, have difficulty establishing investment and return case, focus on smaller opportunities, and have difficulty negotiating. Sellers without an orientation to maximizing their personal income consistently underperform sellers who are motivated by money.
7. Performance orientation
   1. Key points:
   2. Focuses on results
   3. Displays ruthless guardianship of time
   4. Takes advantages of opportunities as they present themselves
   5. Manages pipeline for maximum results
   6. Is driven to win
   7. Doesn’t make excuses for lack of results
   8. Displays same performance orientation with buyers, helping focus them on best opportunities for best business results
   9. These sellers like to win, and they like to help others win. Performance orientation drives the sellers to achieve. They like to make the presidents club. They like to get better and better and be at the top of their games. Thus, they have no use for time wasters (at their companies or in their pipelines) and are masters of their time and activity management.
   10. Performance orientation comes out in solution crafting as well. Buyers notice when sellers have a strong sense of what will work best and have an inclination to sell only things that will have the biggest and most positive impact. They focus on, craft, and present the best solutions and give the best advice to buyers to help them succeed.
   11. Sellers without performance orientation: These sellers don’t manage time and activities to get the best results and thus don’t get the best results. They don’t succeed when the need to make an investment and return case is necessary.

Qualities

1. Gravitas
   1. Key points:
   2. Is substantive and confident
   3. Is credible, a person to take seriously
   4. Insight sellers need people to take their advice. Look up definitions of the word gravitas, and you’ll find influences, such as authority, power, and the ability to command respect. In part, gravitas is about competence, pedigree, and judgment, but it’s also about appearances and interaction style. People who joke too much, talk too much, have bad posture, or don’t take care of their physical appearance can have problems being taken seriously.
   5. Without gravitas: Buyers won’t take sellers’ advice; sellers will not advance to, or succeed with, executive buyers. Sellers will have difficulty setting meetings and can wilt under pressure. They have the propensity to be taken advantage of in negotiations and dismissed when someone better comes along.
2. Business acumen
   1. Key points:
   2. Has a keenness and quickness of understanding business situations
   3. Gives advice and makes decisions likely to lead to good outcomes
   4. Understands organizations, people and how they work, change, innovation, finance and accounting, and key drivers of profit and success
   5. Even if sellers are experts in their particular products, they’ll always be limited in the impact they can have on the client if business acumen is lacking. When buyers think that sellers know what they’re talking about on the micro level (product or service) and the macro level (business results they will have, pros and cons of different courses of action, how to implement with best success, and how to get others on board), they are more inclined to trust their advice.
   6. Also, it’s very common for sellers across industries to sell as a benefit, “I’ll help you make better decisions.” When sellers have business acumen, they actually can. Buyers sense and value this.
   7. Without business acumen: It’s difficult to establish credibility, define and communicate insights and advice that will lead to good outcomes, make a return on investment (ROI) case, drive action and change, and get and keep a seat at the executive table.
3. Perseverance
   1. Key points:
   2. Is willing to do what it takes to succeed
   3. Is willing to stick with something even when it’s difficult to do so
   4. Has the ability to continue to focus on the task at hand when presented with an attractive (and distracting) alternative
   5. Sticks to it over the long term
   6. Sellers with perseverance work hard and stay on course. This affects many things in insight selling: pursuing a sale (that’s worth pursuing) in the face of resistance, the ability to recover from setbacks and keep going, and the willingness to pursue the knowledge needed to be an insight seller.
   7. Without perseverance: Sellers give up too easily, become distracted from doing what’s important when something seemingly more enjoyable comes along, and generally don’t undertake the pursuit of knowledge and skill necessary to succeed with insight selling.
4. Integrity
   1. Key points:
   2. Has strong moral values, including virtue of purpose (doing the right things), transparency of purpose (not having hidden agendas), and meeting commitments consistently
   3. In Chapter 7 we covered the importance of integrity as a component of trust.
   4. Without integrity: Sellers may be able to sell, but success doesn’t last long. They either are found out for not being virtuous or ruin relationships by not consistently doing what they say they’re going to do.
5. Emotional intelligence
   1. Key points:
   2. Understands and manages emotions of self and others
   3. Includes comfort with tension
   4. Doesn’t need approval
   5. Handles difficult personalities
   6. Perceives and adjusts style based on others
   7. Does not become distracted in the moment or react emotionally
   8. Does not panic
   9. Does not succumb to self-limiting beliefs
   10. Manages buyer emotions
   11. Uses emotional impact
   12. Has a good attitude
   13. If assertiveness is the willingness to say what needs to be said that might get sellers fired, it’s emotional intelligence that keeps them from being fired. Sellers with emotional intelligence perceive what’s going on with people, make good decisions about how to affect emotions at any given time, and have the personal emotional maturity not to get themselves in hot water.
   14. Perception and emotional maturity are not just about staying out of hot water, though. Sometimes it’s time for a seller to jump in and stir the pot. Sellers with emotional intelligence tend to pick the right times to stir and the right times to avoid temptation to stir when it won’t help.
   15. A component of emotional maturity is a good attitude. Sellers who believe the world is against them, buyers are against them, their competitors are better than they are, and so on are less likely to succeed. When sellers have a bad attitude, buyers notice that; it’s repelling and subtracts from a person’s gravitas. Finally, sellers with emotional maturity don’t make excuses for lack of success. They realize their success is in their own hands. Although they might feel like it, they don’t make excuses or pout when things don’t go their way. They get over it and get back on the horse.
   16. Without emotional intelligence: Sellers will not be able to create or succeed in situations that require tension; will have difficulty negotiating, creating and maintaining a peer dynamic, and managing the emotions of others (which can scuttle sales and diminish perception of value); and will react emotionally in ways that are detrimental to relationships and sales. They will also be their own worst enemy if they believe they are likely to fail, they don’t feel they deserve success, the glass is half empty, or they spend more time making excuses for lack of results versus pursuing them in the face of obstacles.

Self-Assessment Instruments

Assessment instruments have been gaining in popularity for years. They can be very helpful in understanding people’s attributes and for understanding a person’s approach to selling situations. Some are also very good at testing for verbal and numerical reasoning. Self-assessment instruments are not good at assessing certain attributes, such as integrity, gravitas, and other characteristics, that require observation to be appreciated.

Although self-assessments are not perfect, some are generally accurate. Often (as people put it to us) they’re eerily on target. Self-assessment instruments are a very helpful component in guiding training and development, as well as comparing candidates for hire.

360° Assessments

Commonly referred to as multirater assessments, 360° assessments can provide insight for development and career paths. As selling responsibilities become larger and more complex, such as in strategic account management, a number of people on the team can offer valuable input on where sellers are and how they can improve. And the boldest of companies will include their clients and prospects in the assessment process to get an impression of what the outside world thinks about their selling teams.

Assessment Centers

One of the best and most rigorous ways to test for skills, knowledge, and attributes is to design simulations and role plays and directly observe sellers in action. Want to find out if they can deliver a convincing story—one that would inspire a buyer to want to pursue an investment opportunity? Then have your sellers deliver to you. While you’re at it, include specific planned objections and resistance. Assign people buyer personas so that you can observe that the seller identifies who’s who and interacts with them accordingly.

The higher the stakes, the more assessment centers can help drive success in training, coaching, and hiring.

Overview

Process and method (what to do) + skills and knowledge (can do) + attributes (will do and how well) = performance.

Key Takeaways

• Attribute key points and problems when missing

  Attributes	Key Points	Problems When Attribute Is Missing
  Passion for working, selling	Working: desire for success in general. Selling: passion to succeed in selling.	Sin of omission: They don’t do the work. Compliance versus commitment if they do.
  Conceptual thinking	Conceive innovative ideas and select the right strategies. See how parts affect the whole. Mental discipline to think structurally and systematically.	Ideas are not interesting, not positioned properly. Don’t craft compelling solutions. Don’t inspire buyer confidence. Don’t seek knowledge.
  Curiosity	Interest in people and situations. Thirst for knowledge. Strive to become an expert. Believe in education in sales.	Insights aren’t fresh and aren’t that insightful. Don’t ask enough questions. Don’t listen. Don’t plan well.
  Sense of urgency	Value speed. Drive to move sales forward and take action. Impatience with status quo. Prefer good and fast versus perfect and slow.	Let too much time slip by. Allow negative buyer behavior. Don’t focus on actions that drive best results. Don’t push for decisions.
  Assertiveness	Take control and lead. Take and defend a point of view. Insert self into important situations. Create disruption. Willing to prospect. Debate.	Don’t create tension and disruption required to create change. Don’t practice interaction insight. Don’t get on buyers’ radar screen.
  Money orientation	Comfortable discussing money.	Don’t qualify prospects.
  	Understand how businesses make money.	Don’t establish investment and return case.
  	Motivated to maximize personal income.	Focus on smaller opportunities.
  		Don’t negotiate well.
  Performance orientation	Manage time. Focus on results. Take advantage of opportunities as presented. Manage pipeline for maximum results. Driven to win. Don’t make excuses. Help buyers focus on best opportunities for best business results.	Don’t manage time and activities. Make excuses for lack of results. Don’t succeed when there’s need to make an investment and return case. Don’t get the best results.

• Quality key points and problems when missing

  Qualities	Key Points	Problems When Quality Is Missing
  Gravitas	Substantive and confident.	Advice not taken.
  	Credible, a person to take seriously.	Don’t succeed with executive buyers.
  		Wilt under pressure.
  		Don’t perform well in negotiations.
  		Dismissed when someone better comes along.
  Business acumen	Quick to understand business situations.	Don’t establish credibility.
  	Give advice and make decisions likely to lead to good outcomes.	Don’t communicate insights and advice that will lead to good outcomes.
  	Understand organizations, people, change, innovation, finance and accounting, and key drivers of profit and success.	Don’t drive action and change. Don’t make ROI cases.
  Perseverance	Willing to do what it takes to succeed. Willing to stick with difficult tasks. Ability to focus on the task at hand. Stick-to-itiveness over the long term.	Don’t persevere. Easily distracted—tendency to do other work not selling related. Don’t pursue knowledge and skill necessary to succeed with insight selling.
  Integrity	Strong moral values, virtue of purpose.	Success doesn’t last long.
  	Transparency of purpose.	Uncovered for not being virtuous.
  	Meet commitments consistently.	Ruin relationships.
  Emotional intelligence	Understand and manage emotions of self and others.	Don’t create or succeed in situations that require tension.
  	Handle difficult personalities.	Get flustered, lose focus.
  	Adjust style based on others.	Don’t negotiate well.
  	Don’t become distracted or react emotionally.	Don’t create and maintain a peer dynamic.
  	Don’t panic. Don’t succumb to self-limiting beliefs. Good attitude.	Don’t manage the emotions of others. Poor attitude.

• Assess for competencies: Beyond direct observation—which is an important part of assessing if someone has a skill or attribute but is time-consuming and not practical to do across all skills and attributes—assessment methods include self-assessment instruments, 360° assessments, and assessment centers.
• Self-assessment instruments: Good for: Understanding people’s attributes and a person’s approach to selling situations. Some very good at testing for verbal and numerical reasoning. A very helpful component in guiding training and development as well as comparing candidates for hire. Not good for: Assessing certain attributes, such as integrity, gravitas, and other characteristics that require observation to be appreciated.
• 360° assessments: Good for: Providing insight for development and career paths, and for larger, more complex selling responsibilities, such as in strategic account management, teams (and even clients and prospects) can offer valuable input.
• Assessment centers: Good for: Directly observe sellers in action. The higher the stakes, the more assessment centers can help drive success in training, coaching, and hiring.