The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

At The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), we’re big believers in talent. And nothing confirms our trust in talent more than when we witness a direct connection between the talent level of a given salesperson and the success they achieve.

When highly talented, that success happens more quickly and it lasts over the long haul — and when talent is softer, success is modest at best. Same is true for highly talented sales staffs versus those less talented. 

But our confidence in the predictable relationship between strong sales talent and strong sales performance has confirmed something else — talent is rare and precious. Talented salespeople are worth their weight in gold not only because they produce prodigious returns on the investment employers make in them, but also because they’re so darn hard to find.

And a staff full of such salespeople? A sales manager should count themselves an unusually outstanding recruiter and manager if half the staff is highly talented. 

Much is written every year about corporate culture. And yes, every corporation has a culture—they may not have built it purposefully, they may not be proud of it, it may hold the organization back rather than propel it to success—but there’s always a culture and it always impacts performance.

Don’t look to a mission or vision statement hanging on the wall to discern the culture of a given organization. Just watch what the people do. Despite what the pretty prose might say, the actual culture is revealed in how the company’s people interact with each other and with the outside world, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day.

Say it either way: The culture—values, attitudes, beliefs, priorities, expectations, attitudes, taboos, unwritten rules—is demonstrated by the aggregate behaviors of its people. Or the people define the culture by how they act.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is by the late Steve Marx, and was written and published in 2015. To keep it current, we’ve updated the content to be relevant, but preserved the knowledge that Steve shared.

There are countless lists of what the most successful salespeople actually do. It’s time for a list of what they don’t do.

Let’s call it "The Un-Checklist"—the list you review when no one is looking over your shoulder (so you can be entirely honest), and where you hope that your honesty doesn’t force you to check off any of the items.

Get out your pen, ink, or virtual notes. I hope you won’t need to use them.

The following blog post was first published in 2015 by the late Steve Marx, founder of The Center for Sales Strategy, and has been one of the most popular posts in the blog’s history. Even though the text is updated, the message has never been more relevant. To learn more about Steve Marx, click here.

Most of us don’t head to the supermarket without a list in hand, and without knowing exactly what we intend to come home with. I needn’t explain why.

Likewise, most of us wouldn’t start driving to an unfamiliar destination without first finding it on our GPS and clicking for directions. Doing so gets us to our goal with the least hassle and the most efficiency.

It turns out there’s something much more important.

Let’s start by acknowledging the essential nature of strategy to the success of any venture, old or new, commercial or non-profit. Strategy is the grand plan, how your solutions fit with the problems they’re intended to solve, your path to market, your role in the competitive landscape, and the relationship you seek with customers. Important? Heck, yes. We built the name of our company around that word. 

Too many sales organizations don’t have a strategy, don’t believe their strategy, don’t understand their strategy, and/or don’t follow their strategy. Their daily activities are a mish-mash of ill-fitting, often contradictory, tactics, programs, projects, and promotions—Band-Aids to cover the gaping hole where strategy is supposed to be. They create a “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get” environment that wears everyone out and leaves the organization well short of its dream, its potential, even its short-term goals, quotas, and budgets. No wonder Sun-Tzu, writing 3,000 years ago in The Art of War, called tactics without strategy “the noise before defeat.”

"If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words." — Marcus Tullius Cicero (c. 106-43 B.C.), Roman philosopher, lawyer, and orator

Empathy may have been too touchy-feely a concept in Cicero’s day to have been awarded its own word. In fact, the modern word empathy is a 19th century creation in German (einfühlung), migrating to English in the early 20th. 

But as soon as a concept is given its own word in Webster’s (the lexicological equivalent of a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame?), the word takes over. It can take on all sorts of meanings never intended at its creation or denoted by its creators. 

Today, for most people, empathy is pretty indistinguishable from sympathy, from the concept of wanting to comfort others in whatever distress they may be experiencing, of being, well, touchy-feely. The drive to comfort another may be useful in sales from time to time, but true empathy—the ability to project yourself into the other person’s shoes—is essential to the success of anyone who is trying to sell almost anything.

After 40 years of sales managing, sales consulting, and sales training, I have seen nearly everything. But I never cease to be amazed at those salespeople who pound their chest like Tarzan, have supreme confidence in their ability to wing it, and therefore don’t prepare adequately for upcoming meetings with prospects. They must think good prospects abound, that if you bust an opportunity there’ll be another one just as good right around the corner.

In the real world good prospects are precious, and blowing it because you weren’t prepared is unforgivable. A capital sin because it’s so preventable. The kind of mistake that should prompt your boss to show you the door.

My colleague Jim Hopes wrote recently about the importance of expectations, explaining our lever analogy . People learn and grow in response to the expectations set by others—parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, mentors, and in the workplace, most especially managers who know how to do their job.  Expectations are most effective when they’re individualized, tailored to the unique strengths of each person you manage and to where they are in their growth curve.

Since the first salesperson roamed the earth in prehistoric times (yes, we know what she was selling, but that’s not the focus of this article!), prospecting has been defined as looking for people who might become customers, or simply, looking for customers.

There’s a slightly different definition, not nearly as well known, that opens up a whole new vista of opportunity: Looking for customer needs. Just one word is different, but it changes the entire meaning.

What this New Definition Does to You

The first thing that happens when you add that word is that you automatically—instantaneously! —start focusing on customer needs instead of the products and services you handle. Your empathy, expertise, and problem-solving capabilities take center stage, making you more interesting, more useful, and more likely to be viewed as a trusted and valued source.