149: Self Delusion Has No Place In The Sales World

<p>Sales is one of the few things in business you can measure accurately and immediately.  Are you getting greater efficiencies from your internal systems?  Is the marketing working?  Are our team becoming more skillful?  Are our leaders effective? These are topics which are super important but also devilish to measure.  Sales however is straightforward – how much did you sell?  Therefore, there is no wiggle room and the pressure on salespeople is enormous.  There are deadlines for sales and there are accurate measures in place tracking everything.  What was the revenue return relative to the ratio of the salesperson’s total costs.  For every yen the salesperson costs, how much do they generate in net revenue return.  Are they yielding a 3:1 return or is the ratio at 7:1 or better?</p> <p>Because of all of this pressure, salespeople have become absolute masters of excuse making.  Having to justify your existence every month creates a tremendous amount of creativity in the excuse field.  When you ask salespeople what is holding them back from achieving higher levels of performance, a surprising number of the reasons given are not related to sales activities.  External factors are listed up very readily.  The organisation needs to be better staffed, the product needs improvement, after sales service is holding us back, the strategy needs more work, the market is shifting, my sales manager is clueless, etc.</p> <p>Many of the problems are located outside the sphere of influence of the salesperson, yet they continue to dwell on these factors as holding them back from achieving their targets. This is a substantial lack of self-awareness.  If a salesperson is really doing their job, they ignore all of the external factors they cannot control and instead focus on developing the skills they need to succeed.</p> <p>What would those skills be?  Knowing your product and the value it generates inside out is a given.  Yet this is where a lot of salespeople check out.  They know the details of the features of what they are sel