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Selling is a challenging profession. In fact, it can be downright hard and nothing I can teach you will make the act of selling easier because selling is the process of encouraging someone to give away their hard earned money in exchange for a good or service. If the person really needs that good or service and has no viable alternatives, then selling can be relatively easy. But if the person has many options or hasn't a clearly defined need or doesn't know whom to trust, then selling takes time and patience and persistence.

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It requires a thick skin and a resilient personality because the salesperson here is know far more often than she hears. Yes. We can't make the process of selling easier or simpler because so much human motivation is involved on both sides, but we can look for ways to motivate ourselves and make the role more rewarding. How? By investing in the personal development that will make us more successful by becoming more holistic and big picture in our approach so we can focus on the overall success instead of the smaller nose and maybe lasers.

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In my experience, the most rewarding and empowering thing one can do is to focus on becoming a more successful person from the inside out. So that's what this training is all about. We're going to discuss the traits that are known to be contributors to success as a salesperson and in fact, to success in general. First, I'll quickly introduce myself, I'm the owner of HIll Management Group, and we have several brands that serve small business owners in strategy, marketing services, professional development and news and information.

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I did spend most of my career as a fix it specialist for ailing companies, and I've been the president and or CEO for companies ranging in the forty five million per year to 600 million per year revenue ranges, including companies like Rio Grand in the jewelry industry, and Fulcrum Direct, which had several catalogs in the apparel industry. And over the years I've developed a lot of strategies that facilitate growth and profitability. In 2007, I left my last corporate post and I formed my own company because I wanted to take what I'd learned over the years and bring it to small business owners so they could compete more effectively in our increasingly boundaryless world.

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Successful salespeople have been studied extensively and we can confidently draw certain conclusions about their personality and behavioral traits, personality is the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character. And behavior is the way in which one acts or conducts oneself toward others. While we can't always choose to be extroverted if our nature is to be introverted, there are many personality traits that we can cultivate over time. When it comes to behaviors, all of our behaviors are chosen and they can be turned into habits with practice.

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So there are two components to being a successful salesperson and really being any kind of successful person. The first component is to cultivate the personality aspects that will help us to be successful. In most cases, these personality attributes determine success regardless of profession. The second component is to consistently choose those behaviors that are most likely to help you succeed. One of the biggest barriers to confidence and self motivation is not knowing what we need to do to get from where we are now to where we want to be.

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So this training is intended to give you the roadmap of personal development, necessary to be a successful salesperson. You can pursue success systematically and effectively if you know what you must do. Let's evaluate first the personality traits of successful salespeople, I've grouped them into five groups with the most fundamental group success orientation at its center. To be a successful salesperson, you must cultivate the following traits. The first is success orientation, which means an internal drive to accomplish goals and stay attentive to those goals.

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Drive and tenacity, which is about the persistence you need, persistence for the purpose of succeeding at whatever you've set out to achieve. Responsibility and accountability, which is about taking responsibility for everything in one's life and never succumbing to blame or to victimhood. Positivity and enthusiasm. And people skills, including listening to others, having an active interest in others and a genuine desire to help others. So let's break each of these down. A person with success orientation is internally driven to accomplish goals and can stay attentive to their goals, these focused individuals are more demanding of themselves than other people are of them, and they are very self-motivated.

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They are able to organize themselves and they recognize what they need to do in order to achieve their goals. So they don't just set the goals, they actually make their personal roadmaps for achieving each goal in a salesperson.

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Success orientation produces the best results when it is balanced with empathy. And we'll talk more about empathy and one of the slides coming up. When you balance success, orientation with empathy, you see a person who listens and identifies with the customer while keeping focused on their goals, someone who's able to translate their personal goals into solutions for the customer to achieve a win win. So what are the traits of a success oriented person? Well, they're focused. They're confident.

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They're goal oriented, very eager to exceed expectations and patient without being complacent. So what you can do and this is true of the next five slides, a simple personal assessment, ask yourself, do I set goals for myself? Articulate my goals clearly and assign time like timelines to them, take responsibility for my own guidance and direction, possessed self-discipline and conscientiousness. Accept direction and guidance from my mentors and managers and take a long view of success. You were probably able to say yes to several of these, if not all of them, but if there's any one or two or whatever the number is of questions in this personal assessment to which you said no or sometimes or not very often, put it on a separate list right now, because this will become the list of personal development attributes that you want to work on.

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Drive and tenacity are similar to optimism in that all these traits require persistence, but drive is specifically persistence for the purpose of succeeding and above all, winning. It's all about competitiveness when a person just hangs in there sweating and pushing and clenching their fists. This gridding appetite to succeed at his or her goal. That's when you see a powerful drive. These types of people are very self-motivated and self starters with clear ideas about what they want to achieve. A tenacious person is not afraid of hard work and they're not afraid of losing.

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They believe that everything happens, that happens, whether it's negative or positive, can be used to improve themselves and to do even better in the future. Tenacious people do not believe that they are fragile. They believe that they are strong and that they'll ultimately succeed. And they devote energy and enthusiasm to the experience itself and not just to the ultimate rewards or conclusions. So what are the traits of a person with drive and tenacity? Well, they're disciplined, they're diligent about following up.

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They're slow to become discouraged and they're excited about the hunt. So, again, you can do your personal assessment, ask yourself, do I enjoy competing? Do I constantly look for ways to measure myself against my peers? Do I possess leadership qualities? Do I assert my influence effectively? Do I want to win? And do I enjoy taking risks and learning from mistakes? Once again, anything that you don't have a resounding yes for. Put it on your developmentalist.

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A person with a strong sense of responsibility does not place blame on other people when placed in difficult situations, we refer to this type of person as an agent. Agents get things done, and when obstacles arise, they accept any errors or omissions or stumbles that have occurred as their own. They own them. He or she does not get defensive. He doesn't try to blame the situation on circumstances or on other people. You would never hear an accountable person say, well, it's not my fault that consumer confidence declined because of the economy tanking.

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They don't accept outside restrictions as a reason for not achieving. So the traits of a responsible and accountable person is that this is a person who is completely responsible for their own life and success, and they take responsibility for motivating themselves. They don't wait for others to motivate them. They look for better ways of doing things and they're very dedicated to personal growth. So here's your personal assessment. Do I possess an appropriate sense of urgency about getting my work done?

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Do I feel responsible for all my results, good and bad? Do I anticipate consequences and evaluate alternatives before acting? Do I never make excuses? Do I take action when needed? And do I accept valid criticisms and suggestions for performance improvement with grace? Add your less fans are nose to your personal development list and then we'll move on. A salesperson with a healthy amount of optimism can be described as someone who is slow to learn helplessness, I just love that phrase, slow to learn helplessness.

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This person has persistence, a trait that is critical in the sales world because of the frequency of rejections that salespeople experience in the face of failure. Some people throw their hands up in the air and resign themselves to the disappointment because they feel helpless to to change the situation. The optimistic person, however, sees themselves as being more resilient. They recognize that a customer refusal is not a rejection of them personally, but of the opportunity that they offered salespeople who possess a large amount of optimism like themselves.

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And when they encounter failure, of course, they're disappointed, but it doesn't destroy their positive view of themselves. They consider themselves still in the running and able to turn the situation around. They believe that they can make things better by using a different approach or by trying again. So the traits of this person are that they're optimistic that they are more likely to look on the positive side than the negative side of every situation. They're enthusiastic and they're energetic.

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So here's your personal assessment. Do I take initiative? Do I focus on opportunities and solutions rather than rejections and failures? Do I refuse to allow rejection on one call to affect my positivity on the next call? Do I persist in presenting my offer in spite of possible rejection? And do I view each rejection as the beginning of the next possibility? One of the things to keep in mind is that humans evolved from beings, they had to protect themselves constantly.

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And so our brains are wired to focus much more on the negative than the positive. You know, if you were an early human and you were spend all your time looking at how beautiful the sky was and how soft the grass was and how cute your kids were, you might not notice that a lion was coming up behind you. So our brains are wired to focus on the negative. But just like we've grown out of appendixes, we've kind of grown out of that wiring, too.

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You need to train your brain to look at the positive side of things because otherwise all you'll focus on is the negatives and lots of positives are happening. And finally, people skills, people skills involve understanding ourselves and moderating our responses to others, talking effectively, listening effectively, empathizing accurately, building relationships of trust and respect, and always seeking productive interactions with others. Of all the people skills, empathy is the most important to develop. Empathy is the ability to identify with customers, to feel what they're feeling, and to let your customers know that you respect them.

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Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy involves feeling a certain loyalty to another individual. Empathy is more than just understanding their concerns from an objective standpoint. When you have true empathy for someone, you can gain their trust and establish rapport with them because you're actually able to see the situation from their point of view and. Relate to the way they feel about it. Empathy allows the salesperson to read customers to show concern and to clearly demonstrate their interest in providing a proper solution to the customer.

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The second most important people skill and probably the most underrated of the people skills is listening. Excellent salespeople listen more than they speak. They ask open ended questions and they work really hard to gain an understanding of the customer's needs and then find and offer a solution. Great salespeople always ask their questions why they want something done, not just what they want done. So the traits of someone with excellent people skills is that they are truly interested in potential clients in their businesses and in their needs.

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They're good listeners. They're good at putting thoughts and ideas clearly into words in the way that the other person can understand, and they're interested in achieving balanced and mutually satisfying outcomes. So here's your personal assessment. Do I listen more than I speak? Do I identify other people's feelings and frustrations objectively, even if I don't personally agree with them? Can I establish rapport easily? Can I put people at ease? Do I build relationships of trust and respect?

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Do I look for win wins? And do I have a genuine desire to help others? So these are the personality traits of the most successful salespeople and really the most successful people. Remember that you may be born with certain personality aspects that are hard wired and such as the ones I mentioned before, introversion and extroversion. But most personality traits can be cultivated when you're conscious about who you want to be and what you want to achieve. So now that we've talked about the personality traits, let's talk about the behavioral traits of successful people, this is the whole list right here.

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This is the list that shows up again and again and again in very successful sales people. So first they set their goals. They don't wait to be given goals by someone else. They set them. They own them. They monitor them. They're very goal driven. They don't think in terms of individual sales. They think in terms of building a business. They're always focused on the big picture. They ask high value questions, the questions that get a customer to start talking about their real needs and real desires and real experience.

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They're very persistent. They know how to balance the persistence, but not become a pest, and for that we go back to the personnel or the personal skills, the people skills and the empathy. The more empathy you have, the better you'll be at recognizing when you're about to cross from being persistent to pest. They present the value of their product or service relative to their customers needs, so the customer is always seeing the value from their own perspective.

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They keep in touch with their customers, they show personal interest, they engage at a level beyond just selling. They use their current clients to help them find new clients because your best client references are going to help you really leverage your growth. They always under promise and over deliver, and that doesn't mean making bloated commitments that are just way longer than you think so that you can always come in under the delivery, because if you tell someone it's going to take six weeks and they think it should only take four, you've left them disappointed until you deliver it in four.

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So you have to make rational commitments and still come in early or lower or fast or whatever it is, but always under promise and over deliver the network, network, network. They invest in relationships and in their community and the community of buyers. Whatever it is, they find a way to build relationships within that network. They never see failed sales attempts as failures, but as investments in the overall process. And they never give up on unsold clients.

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The most motivating thing I can think of is to know that I am completely in control of my own success. Nobody can hold me back. Nobody can keep me down. There will always be temporary setbacks and even big disappointments. But I can rise above them. When you pursue development of these personality traits and choose these specific behaviors, you will become more successful every single day. Selling is hard work, but it can have huge rewards, both monetarily and professionally.

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This is true of most things in life, if you think about it, and it's really important to remember that it's not like selling is hard for you and it's easy for everybody else. Don't think for a minute that other sales people have it easier than you. The only real difference between successful salespeople and unsuccessful ones is the things you've learned today in this training. Thank you for joining me, and this has been another StrategyWerx training experience, I hope you will look for opportunities to watch or read or engage in our other training experiences, many of them free, a lot of them paid at strategywerx, dotcom and at YouTube.

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Dotcom slash businesswerx.