Top sales performers are different from the rest. In this podcast segments Scott discusses:
- Those who exceed quota don’t take advice from those that don’t meet quota
- Top sales performers push through the middle
- They have the confidence to say “no” to low probability prospects
- They focus and go narrow and deep rather than wide and shallow
This segment of the Marketer of the Day Podcast with Robert Plank episode is below with transcript.
Full podcast episode with transcript can be found here.
Transcript – lightly edited
Robert Plank: [00:00:00] And so if people say, okay, Scott is right, my foundation is broken. I don’t even know what the big picture, like what is the big picture? What should we be setting up? What should we be doing as far as our sales sequence?
Scott Channell: That would be dependent upon whether you’re cold calling, whether you’re at a first meeting and you’re trying to follow up.
But if we just stick to cold calling, then we know statistically that those who are most likely to buy look like the ones that have already bought. Okay. That’s basic marketing 1 0 1. So you have to have a clear picture of what your bullseye is, in order to hit it. And it’s interesting if I might use a talking about top performers in the sense, what do performers do?
They are very different than the rest. Okay. People who exceed quota do not take advice from people who don’t meet quota. Alright. So I find it always interesting that top [00:01:00] performers. Do things differently than the rest. And they push through the middle, everybody gets excited in the beginning, oh, we’re all excited, we’re gonna tackle it, and we’re gonna do whatever’s necessary.
And then people love the end. Okay. They love the sell the wins. Where a lot of people lose it as the middle, and it’s in the middle where we lose things because we know that people tend not to go deep enough. To interact enough times with somebody to build the trust and credibility.
They tend to as a generalization, abandon their best processes far too early and follow up less frequently than they should. The other interesting thing, I tell a story from my early days when I was first looking to do appointment setting or fell into it by accident. I. Where I had a direct mail background, so I was used to taking people’s money professional service people, think lawyers, accountants, and so forth, and then spending their money on, the old things of the day, direct [00:02:00] mail and yellow pages and newsletters and that type of thing.
And you learn really quickly in that environment, Hey, if I spend money in these places and follow, it tends to work better if I money in those places. And if I. It works a lot better than if I fall hope another way. And oh, by the way, if I structure my messaging, headline, body copy, offer, those basics you tend to learn things quickly.
So I, I can remember my first big appointment setting project, and I had really never done appointment setting. And I had a company that needed to book meetings with companies that with at least a thousand employees. And the meetings had to be set at the executive B VP level. So how the heck do you do that?
And this company was great company, but they had been trying for years to book appointments at that level, had nothing but really poor results. So I didn’t know exactly [00:03:00] Robert how to do it, but one thing I did know is that these smart people had tried over and over again to do it and hadn’t figured out.
So I knew one thing I shouldn’t do is take advice from them. Okay, sure. So what I did was go out and say who’s best at this? So in those days it was Tony Perello of, selling DeVito fame. Remember that book he was my core source. And then there was Jack Wirth wrote a book called High Probability Selling.
And, I think he had a book called High Probability Prospecting. So these people were very successful. And I listened to them to craft my processes and then through my experiences, direct mail, I said I don’t know exactly how right now, but I do know the process to follow, to figure out right audience, f right messaging.
The end result will be that I will figure it out, but I had to tune out the people in that building because I knew if I was going to [00:04:00] follow them that they did not have the answers. And I think another thing to mention about top performers is top performers, Robert, tend to work in high probability areas and the lower performers of the mediocre.
Really seem to lack the confidence to say, Hey, this is high probability, higher value target. I’m gonna focus on them. This one’s lesser value. There’s less chance of closing. You know what I’m gonna put them on the back burner. And one of the differences that I see among top performances, they have no problem in the world.
Okay. Saying, meeting with someone and saying, Hey, they’re not ready. I’ll follow up with them later. Or, you know what? They’re too small. They’re not worth the time. I’ve got other high probability targets in my pipeline. So top performers they’re different. They push through the middle, they allocate their time properly.
Everybody talks about, the techniques and. [00:05:00] Phrases and things that I consider to be around the edges. But a huge part of sales success is properly allocating your time so that it does you the most good and gets you the best results. And the other thing I’ll mention one of the thing I find very interesting.
It is, it’s not that easy to figure out what works okay in any type of sales in the top performers, unlike others. Don’t abandon what works where I see again and again, people who have success and and I’ll get a call, a year later or something like that. What happened?
The great scripts that were written out that were working, they don’t use them anymore. They got bored with them. The process, they work well. They decided to change it, so the top performers, once they figure out what works, they stay on that road. Okay. Oh, I’m bored with this.
I’m gonna try something different. And that really requires focus.
