Find below the results of a survey conducted by Steve W. Martin with the Harvard Business Review (defies many of the commonly held stereotypes of the traits of successful salespeople):
If you ask an extremely successful salesperson, "What makes you different from the average sales rep?" you will most likely get a less-than-accurate answer, if any answer at all. Frankly, the person may not even know the real answer because most successful salespeople are simply doing what comes naturally.
Over the past decade, I have had the privilege of interviewing thousands of top business-to-business salespeople who sell for some of the world's leading companies. I've also administered personality tests to 1,000 of them. My goal was to measure their five main personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and negative emotionality) to better understand the characteristics that separate them their peers.
The personality tests were given to high technology and business services salespeople as part of sales strategy workshops I was conducting. In addition, tests were administered at Presidents Club meetings (the incentive trip that top salespeople are awarded by their company for their outstanding performance). The responses were then categorized by percentage of annual quota attainment and classified into top performers, average performers, and below average performers categories.
The test results from top performers were then compared against average and below average performers. The findings indicate that key personality traits directly influence top performers' selling style and ultimately their success. Below, you will find the main key personality attributes of top salespeople and the impact of the trait on their selling style.
1. Modesty. Contrary to conventional stereotypes that successful salespeople are pushy and egotistical, 91 percent of top salespeople had medium to high scores of modesty and humility. Furthermore, the results suggest that ostentatious salespeople who are full of bravado alienate far more customers than they win over.
Selling Style Impact: Team Orientation. As opposed to establishing themselves as the focal point of the purchase decision, top salespeople position the team (presales technical engineers, consulting, and management) that will help them win the account as the centerpiece.
2. Conscientiousness. Eighty-five percent of top salespeople had high levels of conscientiousness, whereby they could be described as having a strong sense of duty and being responsible and reliable. These salespeople take their jobs very seriously and feel deeply responsible for the results.
Selling Style Impact: Account Control. The worst position for salespeople to be in is to have relinquished account control and to be operating at the direction of the customer, or worse yet, a competitor. Conversely, top salespeople take command of the sales cycle process in order to control their own destiny.
3. Achievement Orientation. Eighty-four percent of the top performers tested scored very high in achievement orientation. They are fixated on achieving goals and continuously measure their performance in comparison to their goals.
Selling Style Impact: Political Orientation. During sales cycles, top sales, performers seek to understand the politics of customer decision-making. Their goal orientation instinctively drives them to meet with key decision-makers. Therefore, they strategize about the people they are selling to and how the products they're selling fit into the organization instead of focusing on the functionality of the products themselves.
4. Curiosity. Curiosity can be described as a person's hunger for knowledge and information. Eighty-two percent of top salespeople scored extremely high curiosity levels. Top salespeople are naturally more curious than their lesser performing counterparts.
Selling Style Impact: Inquisitiveness. A high level of inquisitiveness correlates to an active presence during sales calls. An active presence drives the salesperson to ask customers difficult and uncomfortable questions in order to close gaps in information. Top salespeople want to know if they can win the business, and they want to know the truth as soon as possible.
5. Lack of Gregariousness. One of the most surprising differences between top salespeople and those ranking in the bottom one-third of performance is their level of gregariousness (preference for being with people and friendliness). Overall, top performers averaged 30 percent lower gregariousness than below average performers.
Selling Style Impact: Dominance. Dominance is the ability to gain the willing obedience of customers such that the salesperson's recommendations and advice are followed. The results indicate that overly friendly salespeople are too close to their customers and have difficulty establishing dominance.
6. Lack of Discouragement. Less than 10 percent of top salespeople were classified as having high levels of discouragement and being frequently overwhelmed with sadness. Conversely, 90 percent were categorized as experiencing infrequent or only occasional sadness.
Selling Style Impact: Competitiveness. In casual surveys I have conducted throughout the years, I have found that a very high percentage of top performers played organized sports in high school. There seems to be a correlation between sports and sales success as top performers are able to handle emotional disappointments, bounce back from losses, and mentally prepare themselves for the next opportunity to compete.
7. Lack of Self-Consciousness. Self-consciousness is the measurement of how easily someone is embarrassed. The byproduct of a high level of self-consciousness is bashfulness and inhibition. Less than five percent of top performers had high levels of self-consciousness.
Selling Style Impact: Aggressiveness. Top salespeople are comfortable fighting for their cause and are not afraid of rankling customers in the process. They are action-oriented and unafraid to call high in their accounts or courageously cold call new prospects.
Not all salespeople are successful. Given the same sales tools, level of education, and propensity to work, why do some salespeople succeed where others fail? Is one better suited to sell the product because of his or her background? Is one more charming or just luckier? The evidence suggests that the personalities of these truly great salespeople play a critical role in determining their success.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Your culture is your brand
The title of this post is from the book "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. We give every new employee at Varrow this book on their first day. One of the big lessons in the book is the importance of culture in building a great company. In Tony Hsieh's words, "At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff -- like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers -- will happen naturally on its own."
A company's culture begins and ends with the people. We at Varrow recently created a site within varrow.com that celebrates our people and offers a glimpse into our culture. Check it out:
http://www.varrow.com/about/people/
A company's culture begins and ends with the people. We at Varrow recently created a site within varrow.com that celebrates our people and offers a glimpse into our culture. Check it out:
http://www.varrow.com/about/people/
Friday, April 1, 2011
Healthcare Headlock
Until coming to Varrow, I had not worked regularly with healthcare organizations. At Varrow though, healthcare organizations represent a significant part of our business, so I have gotten to know this world much better. What I have learned is both exciting on one hand and disturbing on the other.
The exciting aspect of working with hospitals and other healthcare organizations is the notion that the solutions we are designing and implementing for our customers are directly contributing to improved patient care. Being in the technology field, our opportunities to feel like we are really making a contribution is often limited to building strong relationships, helping those around us, and creating a special place to work for our employees. But in working with healthcare organizations, we have the opportunity to do more and that is great.
The stakes are high in the healtchare space though; mistakes or "downtime" can effect patient care and, in extreme examples, cost lives. What I have come to learn is that many companies use this high risk landscape to their advantage. Before I go further, it is important to explain a little about what we at Varrow do in the healthcare space. Our scope and expertise is very specific. We focus on the infrastructure that supports the EMR, PACS, and other healthcare applications that make hospitals go. We handle the servers, storage, network and disaster recovery solutions that these applications run on. We are specialists and we are the absolute best at what we do, but when it comes down to what the doctors and nurses see on a day-to-day basis, it is the applications they see. It's all about the applications - they have all the visibility and they are the software solutions that directly improve patient healthcare. Our role is really to make sure these applications are performing well, are accessible, and stay up and running.
I mention this because it sets the stage for the disturbing part of IT in healthcare. Like I said earlier, the stakes are high in healthcare and mistakes can not be tolerated. As a result, the IT leadership at healthcare organizations are extremely risk averse - and justifiably so! But in my experience, often times application providers take advantage of this fear.
Only in the healthcare space do application providers still wield enough power to dictate what kind of hardware infrastructure will be used to support their applications. Many of the application providers dictate a short list of what hardware infrastructure providers they are willing to certify to work with their applications. Given the stakes, I can understand this and if it stopped there I would say, "Ok, well they are just making sure that their applications are not running on sub-standard infrastructure."
The disturbing part is when these same application providers insist on reselling and implementing this hardware at the customer site. This is not a core competency for them, they do not manufacture infrastructure hardware or software, they are not the best in the world at it, and they often don't have nearly the same level of expertise as the companies who specialize in implementing world-class infrastructure solutions.
It presents an opportunity for the application provider to capture more revenue, but is it really in the best interest of the customer? A comparable analogy would be if Microsoft or SAP or Oracle were to say, "Mr. customer, you can only buy this specific certified hardware (that we happen to resell) for our application AND you need to use our consutlants to implement the hardware."
Customers can push back and insist on buying infrastructure and associated design and implementation services from someone else, but they need to go up against an army of application consultants and account managers encouraging them to do otherwise...and, by the way, patients lives are at stake.
If I am the customer am I going to be bold enough to say to the account team for the Meditechs, McKessons, and Cerners of the world that despite their insistence on reselling and implementing the hardware infrastructure, I am going to leverage the infrastructure experts for the infrastructure portion of the solution?
Many customers are bold enough to do so. But many more are not, so what ends up happening is they pay a MUCH higher markup on this infrastructure and related services and get a lesser experience during the design and implemention of it.
One example of a healthcare application provider doing things right is Epic Systems. Unlike the application providers described above, Epic Systems certifies hardware but does not resell or implement it. They insist on not doing so. It is not a core competency. They are also recognized in the industry for delivering projects on-time and on-budget...and they happen to be the best at what they do. 91% of the HIMMS Stage 7 Hospitals use Epic. This is a certification that, according to HIMMS, recognizes hospitals for the following:
So, for those folks considering a new EMR or PACS solution, consider Epic. And if you decide to go in a different direction than Epic, stand your ground when your application provider tries to sell you the infrastructure and related services. Ask them to break out these costs separately and on a separate quote, ask to talk to their presales and post sales engineers that specialize in the infrastructure, and then compare their cost and capabilities to your local integrator who specializes in this stuff.
The exciting aspect of working with hospitals and other healthcare organizations is the notion that the solutions we are designing and implementing for our customers are directly contributing to improved patient care. Being in the technology field, our opportunities to feel like we are really making a contribution is often limited to building strong relationships, helping those around us, and creating a special place to work for our employees. But in working with healthcare organizations, we have the opportunity to do more and that is great.
The stakes are high in the healtchare space though; mistakes or "downtime" can effect patient care and, in extreme examples, cost lives. What I have come to learn is that many companies use this high risk landscape to their advantage. Before I go further, it is important to explain a little about what we at Varrow do in the healthcare space. Our scope and expertise is very specific. We focus on the infrastructure that supports the EMR, PACS, and other healthcare applications that make hospitals go. We handle the servers, storage, network and disaster recovery solutions that these applications run on. We are specialists and we are the absolute best at what we do, but when it comes down to what the doctors and nurses see on a day-to-day basis, it is the applications they see. It's all about the applications - they have all the visibility and they are the software solutions that directly improve patient healthcare. Our role is really to make sure these applications are performing well, are accessible, and stay up and running.
I mention this because it sets the stage for the disturbing part of IT in healthcare. Like I said earlier, the stakes are high in healthcare and mistakes can not be tolerated. As a result, the IT leadership at healthcare organizations are extremely risk averse - and justifiably so! But in my experience, often times application providers take advantage of this fear.
Only in the healthcare space do application providers still wield enough power to dictate what kind of hardware infrastructure will be used to support their applications. Many of the application providers dictate a short list of what hardware infrastructure providers they are willing to certify to work with their applications. Given the stakes, I can understand this and if it stopped there I would say, "Ok, well they are just making sure that their applications are not running on sub-standard infrastructure."
The disturbing part is when these same application providers insist on reselling and implementing this hardware at the customer site. This is not a core competency for them, they do not manufacture infrastructure hardware or software, they are not the best in the world at it, and they often don't have nearly the same level of expertise as the companies who specialize in implementing world-class infrastructure solutions.
It presents an opportunity for the application provider to capture more revenue, but is it really in the best interest of the customer? A comparable analogy would be if Microsoft or SAP or Oracle were to say, "Mr. customer, you can only buy this specific certified hardware (that we happen to resell) for our application AND you need to use our consutlants to implement the hardware."
Customers can push back and insist on buying infrastructure and associated design and implementation services from someone else, but they need to go up against an army of application consultants and account managers encouraging them to do otherwise...and, by the way, patients lives are at stake.
If I am the customer am I going to be bold enough to say to the account team for the Meditechs, McKessons, and Cerners of the world that despite their insistence on reselling and implementing the hardware infrastructure, I am going to leverage the infrastructure experts for the infrastructure portion of the solution?
Many customers are bold enough to do so. But many more are not, so what ends up happening is they pay a MUCH higher markup on this infrastructure and related services and get a lesser experience during the design and implemention of it.
One example of a healthcare application provider doing things right is Epic Systems. Unlike the application providers described above, Epic Systems certifies hardware but does not resell or implement it. They insist on not doing so. It is not a core competency. They are also recognized in the industry for delivering projects on-time and on-budget...and they happen to be the best at what they do. 91% of the HIMMS Stage 7 Hospitals use Epic. This is a certification that, according to HIMMS, recognizes hospitals for the following:
- Deliver patient care without the use of paper charts
- Are able to share patient information by sending secure standardized summary record transactions to other care providers
- Use their vast database of clinical information to drive improved care delivery performance, patient safety clinical decision support, and outcomes using business intelligence solutions
- Are best practice examples of how to implement sophisticated EMR environments that fully engage their clinicians
So, for those folks considering a new EMR or PACS solution, consider Epic. And if you decide to go in a different direction than Epic, stand your ground when your application provider tries to sell you the infrastructure and related services. Ask them to break out these costs separately and on a separate quote, ask to talk to their presales and post sales engineers that specialize in the infrastructure, and then compare their cost and capabilities to your local integrator who specializes in this stuff.
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