Consistent Sales Behavior > Fads, Trends, or silver bullets

There are absolutes in sales. It is absolutely true that if you do not practice selling behaviors, you will not sell. If you only practice one sales behavior, you will only get the results tied to that single activity. Being efficient only means you do things quickly. (Imagine sending 1000s of emails quickly) While being effective means you are doing the RIGHT things consistently. (Send 10 emails that all get opened and actioned by the right prospects) Great salespeople seek to be effective first, then efficient with their effective systems. (Getting the right 10 emails to the right prospects with the right message in a shorter span of time)

Order of Operations: Be Effective 1st, then focus on Efficiency.

Selling is a discipline and method to achieving growth outcomes. In practice, sales activities can be called activities, to do items, recipes, cookbooks, or a myriad of other things but they all boil down to this: you must do the work to get the reward. The behavior we have to avoid is making the assumption that there are short cuts; there are no short cuts to building relationships, trust, and success.

Consistency is the tool and method to be applied in sales that links the activities to being effective. Moreover, consistency in repeating behaviors that result in success are what quota busting results are made of.

I have been coaching sales people for a long time and one of my more recent clients had me coach a new, early career salesperson. In the first couple of months of building good discipline around new skills and habits, we began seeing success and the salesperson was happy, exceeding monthly quota, got a promotion, and generally was building a good runway for the year. I was equally pleased with his progress, speed, and forecast. Then, a slump happened: response percentages fell off, he was not keeping data about activities current, a couple of projects occupied his time, not surprisingly and in a short period of time, he was nearly back at the starting point because he was making excuses for not doing the proven sales behaviors, consistently.

What actually happened? A stoppage in networking, entirely, after the 3rd consecutive month of hitting quota. Apathy and a lack of effort. When I asked him why he didn’t have networking events lined up on his calendar, he indicated that he didn’t have enough time to network and deliver on the solutions he previously sold. (For anyone reading this: If you are saying you don’t have enough time to network, you are setting yourself up for tough times.) With no networking efforts, and a drastic reduction in prospecting behaviors across the board, the salesperson’s pipeline went from healthy to sickly in less than a month.

The sales behaviors, and consistency, are imperative for salespeople. What happened to the salesperson I just described is quite common in that a person feels they are succeeding and hitting goals so they focus more on what has already been sold and not about keeping the pipeline healthy with future deals. An overreliance on email and digital communication without supporting relationship connections are a common downfall and root casue for high performers that have uncharacteristically become mediocre.

The solution: we had to go back to the original ramp-up behaviors, refill the relationship building and deals pipelines, and work up to closing volume. This cost him a ton of escalator commission at the end of the year because he had a dip mid-year in his closings.

The consistency of the behaviors is so critical to the health and success of salespeople but too often overlooked. Since we are never guaranteed to win every deal, we have to consistently keep adding new, well-qualified opportunities to the pipeline to ensure we win the amount to achieve and succeed quotas and expectations.

It’s no surprise that fewer than 70% of salespeople hit their quotas annually but those who are consistently in the top quartile of achievement are disciplined in the modern sales behaviors like: social selling, networking, CRM & data utilization, leveraging data insights, and the list goes on.

So we are left to assume and conclude that the case for being consistent in doing the sales behavioral activities to drive success are to be weighted heavily when planning time and calendar management and mapping activities to outcomes in an effort to get the most out of your selling day.

The next time you hear Golden Email, 100% open rate, or some other buzz worthy hook, I challenge you to first consider it as marketing, and then to take an intellectually honest approach to the rest of your activities that make you successful and focus on those first. Those quick win or easy win solutions only are applicable if they are jointly supported by the other sales behaviors. Once you have sound discipline around the outreach, connection, relationship development, sales content management, and other systems, then look for ways to drive efficiency in your effective sales process.

These systems, when applied to organizations and multiple salespeople, are considered sales infrastructure. The consistent use of these systems is called discipline to the system. If your organization needs to develop infrastructure and discipline to get the organization moving forward, I can help. Let’s have that conversation about your success path.

Happy selling.