On Success and Salespeople

Interesting viewpoint on Success and Salespeople from David Kahle on LinkedIn: “The vast majority of mankind, including the vast majority of sales people with whom I work, really don’t want to be successful. They understand that success only comes as a result of the investment of time, money, and emotional energy. And, they don’t want to make the investment. They are motivated to just get by, instead of succeeding.”

After seeing weeks of articles (in my social feeds) on how to be successful, best habits, yadda yadda throughout December, I want to puke. Most people are okay just the way things are. (Until something starts to slide like income or the ability to have a cold brew.)

In a time when we give awards for participation, it will be a small percentage of people – especially sales people – who will have that drive to succeed (not to be confused with that drive to get a paycheck).

So what do you do when you want to hire a salesperson but they are in the 80 percentile instead of the 20? One who doesn’t have the drive to succeed but gives you a solid 40 hours of effort? In many cases, they have a mediocre 15 year career in telecom and a closet full of shirts with logos from the numerous companies that employed them.

Kahle does point out that not everyone is going to be a superstar. Management will need to improve in negotiation and motivation. To get the 80% to be fair to middling. Superstars will be able to work anywhere.

Lots of people don’t like salespeople, but not a lot of selling gets done without a sales team (except for a few network effect impacted unicorns). It will be interesting to watch this progress. Channel sales will become a bigger part of the strategy (for smart companies).

Tags: sales, sellecom, selling
Related tags: sales people, drive succeed, success salespeople, people, sales, success