The Three Pillars I Live By as a Salesperson
Any salesman going into a pitch meeting knows that doing your research about the company, finding out about their objectives or challenges, and bringing your A-game is the first step in getting new business. After all, when you want to impress a potential customer, you want to make sure you know as much as you can, so you have answers when they challenge your competency and intentions.
But to me, a great salesman uses more than his knowledge to close a client. Demonstrating my skills and exhibiting my discipline proves to be very essential in selling. How I communicate, the strategy I use for my opening, when I decide to start talking, and when I should be listening, among many others, create the pillars that can help anyone become a high-performing salesperson. In fact, without knowledge, skill, and discipline, it can shake the very foundation of our efforts as a salesman.
But what exactly does it mean when we use these three things to build our selling framework to become a high-performing salesperson?
Knowledge is power
We can easily define knowledge as what we know— what we can recall, summarize or explain to others. Facts, stories, frameworks, concepts, and formulas are all knowledge. It is what we typically prepare for before talking to clients or for our day-to-day life.
Knowledge also has pitfalls. As a salesperson, it’s easy to rely on what I know. I researched my prospect, read about the big news that affects their business, did background checks on the stakeholders involved, and prepared my speech about what I can do for them. Going on and on about the products or services I offer, stating facts, and enumerating credentials and awards I’ve garnered is easy because I can pull out that information from my knowledge database in a blink of an eye. But when I become over-reliant on my knowledge, I’ll be focusing more on myself and less on them. In the end, I may end up confusing, overwhelming, or boring my clients.
If I rely only on my own, I can also mistakenly use outdated or plainly wrong information that won’t connect with my customer. Imagine sharing a case study from the ’90s when talking to a tech-savvy millennial digital marketer. I won’t get my point across simply because it’s not relevant or it’s not the correct language or story that can tug a nerve.
“I’ve got this” is one of the most dangerous sentences that can be spoken in the business world. And that’s because mindset fuels the energy you can bring in sales. When you say those words, you stop being curious, and you rely on what you know without hesitation. That’s the challenge. When I simply depend on my knowledge, I stop learning, and I stop seeing how there are several other things I can improve on. Knowledge is important, but it’s not all-important. If I can’t put my knowledge into action, then it’s nothing but abstract thought. Until I can act on what I know, the things I know about my chosen profession won’t make a difference in my performance.
Rewiring my mind with skills
When you go into a room to sell, do you think of the skills you will use to close the deal as much as the information, ideas, and frameworks you add to your presentation file? Did I focus on how I’ll share the narrative— is it through a list of facts or storytelling? How about the way I assess their interest— is it checking their body language and facial expression or asking them point-blank about their hesitation?
Skills talk about the timing of an action. When do I speak? When do I object? When do I show case studies? When do I ask an impact question? When do I tell a great story? Developing my skills, using, and practicing them lets me become a high-performing salesman because it allows me to improve what I know, update the knowledge I have gathered, and lets me get better and better at what I do.
Your skills are abilities you acquired through practice, sustained effort, and applying feedback you receive over time. When it involves an idea, you can tap your cognitive skills, if it involves a thing then you should use your technical skills, if it involves people, then it uses your interpersonal skills. Regardless of what type of skill you choose to apply when you sell, it’s a continuous cycle because your focus and skills can degrade over time. There isn’t such a thing as “set it and forget it” for any skill you need, whether it’s for selling or for every day. Even when I learned how to ride a bike in my childhood, if I don’t use it, my skills and balance can get rusty, and I need to re-learn and practice it again to be able to ride it as an adult.
In selling, a lot of things can affect decisions, and it’s a matter of using the correct skills so I can showcase my knowledge in the best possible light. It helps to have continuous practice to refresh my mind and rewire my brain to encode new skills and abilities regularly, or I’ll also get rusty.
Choosing discipline
Discipline is a choice. The choice of taking an action or not. But it is binary— I do, or I don’t. However, it’s only effective if I have both knowledge and multiple skills in my roster. If I only know one skill or one kind of knowledge, then there’s no choice to make, and my decision is automatic to that one thing I do know.
Deciding whether you should take action or not is another key aspect of any sales pitch. Do I speak now, or listen until I have all the information I need? Do you I the floor for discussion as I’m are presenting? Do I interact with my audience as I talk? Do I use storytelling to narrate something my prospect can relate to? Do I send them a thank you note after taking a meeting with them?
Discipline and skills go hand in hand. The former answers whether you should perform an action, while the latter answers when you should be doing it. Showing discipline decides if I should ask an impact question, send 50 cold emails, or do my pitch over coffee instead of a conference room. While skills determine at how and what point I should ask the impact question, if I should send 50 cold emails on a Monday morning or on a Wednesday afternoon, or if I am doing a breakfast or afternoon coffee pitch meeting to close a deal.
Balancing knowledge, skills, and discipline
Sales is like a contact sport. You can learn it in theory and practice it until it becomes a habit. But, the only way it works is when you can balance knowledge, skills, and discipline as you constantly grind to get better.
Let me give you an example. A sports coach can easily tell an athlete to read books and theories about basketball or watch gameplays and wins for the past twenty years to learn. They’ll harness the necessary knowledge to understand the rules and mechanics of the game. But that wouldn’t matter if skills and discipline do not accompany the information he gathers during an actual match. An athlete needs the skills to decide the kind of strategy in the gameplay or when it’s best to fall back or go for the kill. He also needs the discipline to determine whether or not he should do each shoot and pass or if an offensive or defensive stance is better within the situation at any given time.
This applies the same to salespeople, I can just read about all strategies and formulas to get new business, but I need to practice, apply, and have the ability to discern when the right timing is.
When you understand knowledge, skill, and discipline at each sales stage, you can make more conscious decisions that rely on only one pillar you are familiar with. I don’t have to leave it to chance if a customer’s decision goes in my favor because I influence it by balancing the three pillars I need to become a high-performing salesperson. Removing the guesswork from the sales process and making each of my actions well-thought-out and deliberate is an essential step in selling.
Taking the time to practice and improve and repeating it over and over makes you better and better. And a high-performing salesman— or any great man— doesn’t stop learning no matter how high your role gets in the corporate hierarchy. Instead, balancing these three pillars becomes a stepping stone for even greater success.
At what level is your knowledge, skill, and discipline? Let’s talk about how we can take it to the next step.
About Jeev
A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.