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The key motivators of successful salespeople are often asked about by managers attending management training courses. If these can better understand, they will be more effective at managing these successful people.

Personal success clearly comes before team performance

Top salespeople are rare. What really distinguishes them from others? Studies carried out by the Gallup Management Consulting Group over a period of 22 years have revealed the following key abilities and talents:

Attribute 1: Concluding sales negotiations

The ability to conclude sales negotiations successfully is principally the result of an amazing amount of persistence. Top salespeople do not allow themselves to be discouraged by failure. They accept that double the amount of sales negotiations means double the amount of failure.

They put up with the inevitable number of unsuccessful visits, because they have absolute faith in themselves and the product and services that they are selling.

Attribute 2: Self motivation

The reasons for top salespeople wanting to get to the top are as different as the people themselves: money; recognition; getting to know people; the desire to prove themselves; etc. The one thing they have in common, however, is that there is a fire burning in them. It is not the sales manager who has lit this fire, but it is he who controls the amount of air that fans the fire and makes sure that it is not extinguished.

This inner motivation is stronger than any motivation package a sales manager can introduce and makes it possible for top salespeople to achieve excellent performances.

Attribute 3: Self discipline

Clients are demanding and there is tough competition. Against this background, sustainable, long-term success is only conceivable if salespeople work in the most organised way possible.

Reliability, meeting deadlines and diligence are the cornerstones of a top salesperson’s working style. They have tailor-made many of the aids they have to help them accomplish this: forms, lists, deadline overviews, presentation portfolios.

Attribute 4: Empathy

Offensive salespeople and power sellers are indisputably successful in certain markets. Salespeople on the whole need to build up and nurture a relationship with the customer. This always entails looking at the situation from the client’s point of view and a good understanding of the client’s problems. A salesperson will only have the patience to do this if they accept the client and emphasise the things that both of them have in common.

If you have a top salesperson like this in your sales team, then it is your job to make sure that they keep their “inner” motivation as taught on all good management training courses. What is the driving force that motivates them? The Gallup Study mentions four “motivational factors” and the effect these have on a sales team:

Competition

Salespeople who are motivated by competition do not only want to win, they want to be better than their competitors. The result is they make no distinction between a sales person from a rival company and a co-worker. They are fair, however, and their performance will also inspire their sales team.

Ego drive

The ego of these top salespeople is the focal point of everything. They want to be the best and get the glory personally. Team performance means nothing to them. You can however motivate these salespeople by making them mentors for young salespeople. They are exhilarated when younger salespeople admire their expertise.

Love of success

This is the motivation that is most desirable to drum into team thinking, but unfortunately team thoughts rarely enter the head of top salespeople. Any salesperson who loves success feels motivated by the task at hand alone. If they achieve a goal, their sights are automatically set a notch higher. Colleagues’ success does not bother them, since the main thing is that the task has been accomplished. Always ensure there are enough challenges to stretch your salespeople.

Service strength

The strength of salespeople who have this inner motivation is the ability to create and build on client relationships. They are constantly on the look-out for the optimum uses for their clients. They are the ones who convey with as much empathy as possible what it is the client actually wants and then go out of their way to achieve this. In the sales team, this type of salesperson is often the work horse who does the less well-liked tasks, because these are the ones which are complicated and drawn out. You need to recognise the fact that your top salespeople fulfil this role.

These are the key motivators and attributes of successful sales people. Managers who hope to further develop their skills of motivating and identifying successful salespeople can attend pertinent management training courses.

Richard Stone is a Director for Spearhead Training Limited that runs management training programmes aimed at improving business performance.

It’s long past time for America to consider the heretical idea of amending the Constitution and make new openings on the Supreme Court term-limited if not elective offices.

When the Founding Fathers devised the Constitution in the late eighteenth century, life expectancy at birth, thanks to rampant diseases, was a mere 24 years although, depending on where one lived, it could range up to 60 in New England, 45 in the Middle Colonies and 35 in the South. Those figures are according to Encyclopedia.com.

Averaging the 3 locales, a person could expect to live 46.7 years, with a little bit of luck. Today, thanks to the marvels of modern science and medicine, Americans can reasonably expect to live well into their seventies and beyond and late eighties and nineties are no longer unusual.

There is no possible way that James Madison and the others involved in the collaborative effort of drafting the marvellous document that is the Constitution of the United States could ever have anticipated septuagenarians and octogenarians among the membership of the Supreme Court.

As sacred as the Constitution is, that situation should be remedied via an amendment if America truly wishes to have justices reflect a cross section of the American people.

If it is decided to continue having the president nominate and the Senate to give its advice and consent in confirmation, one term of ten years would be more than appropriate and reasonable.

Electing justices by popular vote is another option. Though more ticklish since it would make SCOTUS subject to the passing whims of the people, that option is still worth consideration to make the Court more representative of the electorate.

The inspiration for all of the foregoing is that the Supreme Court that will re-convene next October is horrendously misbalanced.

Assuming the confirmation of the latest nominee, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, the new court will have, as it has now, a near-perfect racial cross section of America with Clarence Thomas as a sitting justice. However, there will still be a gender imbalance with only 3 women.

As for religious balance, it will be nowhere near what the Founders envisioned and that situation should be rectified.

For the record, I happen to be a Catholic but it’s patently unfair to have two minority religions, Catholics and Jews, constituting the entire membership of the principal judicial body in America while the majority religion, Protestantism, is not represented at all.

When she is confirmed by the Senate, Kagan will become the third justice of the Jewish persuasion on SCOTUS out of a total of nine. The simplest of math says that 3 of 9 = 33 1/3% with the remaining six seats held by Catholics, or 66 2/3%. The only “problem” with those numbers is that only 2% of Americans are Jewish while 25% are Catholic and 55% are Protestants.

There’s a clear inequity on SCOTUS. Over half the country will not be represented on the highest court in the land.

Something is seriously amok with the Supreme Court and the only plausible rectification is term limits so that one particular president isn’t able to perpetuate his personal ideology for 30 years or more by stacking the Court. Even better, a one-term limit and popular election of SCOTUS justices might be the best alternatives to what we have now.

I feel certain that, under the present circumstances, the Founding Fathers would be happier with the change.

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