Well, 2014 is in the books and we are already 6 days into 2015 and it is promising to be an exciting year! As we looked forward and thought through what we wanted to offer this community of sales professionals for the year ahead we decided we would zero in on what it would take in 2015 for you and I to be the best of the best and to have our best sales year ever! So, with that in mind we landed on the theme of 2015 – The year of Sales Mastery!
There are 2 questions we need to answer …
- The first is what does it mean to be a sales master?
- The second is what would it take?
To the first question Webster’s Dictionary defines the word mastery as – “command of a subject or expert skill or knowledge”. So, that is a pretty good start! In our sales training classes we teach that there are 3 types of sales people …
- The first is what we call the UI or the “unconscious incompetent”. They are not any good at what they do and they have no clue they’re not any good at it. No one reading this blog post is a UI because they don’t read stuff to learn and grow so you’re safe!
- Th second is what we call the UC or “unconscious competent. They’re good at what they do but they can’t tell you why they’re good at it. This group, in our experience, makes up about 90% of the sales people we have worked with through the years and their level of competency ranges from fair to very good. The challenge with being in this group is twofold. 1) they don’t really know what makes them good, or not so good, at what they do so they don’t know what to do to get better or to become the best of the best! 2) they can’t teach anyone else what it is they do so their knowledge and skill set stops with them and isn’t transferred or passed on to others!
- The third is what we call the CC or “conscious competent”. They’re good at what they do and they know why they’re good. They understand their strengths and they leverage them to the max. They are also aware of their challenges as a sales pro and they are either learning to get better in that are or, they find a way to minimize the impact of that shortcoming on their sales business.
To the second question … what is it going to take to be a master of this profession of sales? What we will be focusing in on in 2015 are the following 4 areas of mastery. These 4 buckets of learning are gleaned from our sales design and development work for a broad range of clients over the past 2 decades plus! They are …
- Understanding and quantifying the “value” we bring to clients and customers!
- Intentionally building Level 5 & 6 relationships – you are the person they go to!
- Executing a proven sales process – what are the steps to consistent volume and margin in selling?
- Be coming an extraordinary person, professionally and personally, at the core level.
So, as we head into 2015 all of our sales training blogs, podcasts, nuts and bolts sales training webinars, Q&A live coaching calls, master sales interviews, modular sales training and everything else we do will be focused on becoming a “conscious competent”, or a sales master, in this awesome business we call sales!
Let’e make 2015 an awesome year my friends!
Jim Jacobus
www.jjacobus.com