The 80 / 20 rule has become the ultimate justification for poor performance in sales. Sales management will often state phrases like, “80% of our sales comes from 20% of our customers,” or “80% of our sales comes from 20% of our sales force.” These are terrible odds! That means that four out of every five sales people should be doing something else. How do so many smart executives and experienced sales managers make so many hiring mistakes? The problem typically falls onto the company’s recruiting practices: looking for the wrong people in the wrong places.

Early in my sales career I learned that it was just as easy to sell a large deal as it was to sell a small one, but I couldn’t rely on the traditional sources of leads (ie. marketing) to provide me a consistent flow of “whales.” With my sales manager, we researched our largest customers and mapped out a profile of traits that were similar to each: size of business, number of employees, industries, key business pains and reasons for buying our solution. We developed an ideal customer profile, and within six months of this exercise I increased my average size deal by 500%. To eliminate the 80 / 20 rule in sales people, this same type of exercise must be completed to identify what is the ideal sales profile.

What makes a sales person a top performer? It’s not training and it’s not sales tools, although those are great investments for your top performers. It’s what’s inside them: empathy, persuasiveness, persistence, patience and resilience. These traits are the raw materials of great sales people, and they combine their talents with technical skills, product knowledge and experience to solve the unique problems of each of their customer.

Most hiring managers start out their hiring and recruiting efforts with an “I want list,” also known as a job description. A typical job description lists out experiences and skills, but at no time accurately states or measures what it means to be a great sales person in the role. The first step is to start with the results. How much revenue and profit must the sales person produce? What type of relationship will the sales person have with the customer? Is the position’s objective to acquire customers or to develop and maintain existing customers? If you cannot clearly articulate what the person is going to achieve, then you have about as much chance of getting a great sales person as you do at winning it big in Vegas.

The nature of selling PC products to consumers at a big box store compared to selling enterprise servers to government is very different. The very nature of the sales cycle will dictate the type of person who will succeed in the role. All great sales people possess five key behavioral traits:

• Empathy – Knowing what the customer wants
Empathy is the most basic ingredient of successful sales people. It is the ability to understand the needs of each prospect and to sell them the appropriate solution. Empathy is not a “soft” trait. It is the ability to understand how the prospect is feeling without losing sight of your objectives, to win the business.

• Persuasive drive – The hunter’s trait
For the best sales people, getting a prospect to say “yes” is the primary motivating force. It is a sense of accomplishment, it is an internal desire and it presents victory. Money is not the driver; rather it is the reward for satisfying the sales person’s persuasive drive.

• Service drive – The farmer’s trait
Any sale that requires follow up or engagement with a customer beyond an initial yes requires service drive. This is the gratification that comes from receiving compliments such as “thank you” and “I appreciate your help.” It is very easy to confuse service drive and persuasive drive during an interview, because a person with high service drive will try to emulate and present himself to get the interviewer’s approval. The problem arrives when it comes time to hunt, the person with high service drive is not motivated to persuade, but is motivated to serve.

• Pace – The internal clock

The amount of patience required to sell largely depends on the sales environment. A person with a high degree of pace is patient, methodical and consistent, while a person with low pace is urgent, driving and impatient. A hunting role typically requires a person with low pace to keep looking for those “yeses.” While the person selling large enterprise solutions will demonstrate a higher level of pace, and be more methodical and detail oriented.

• Ego resilience – Personal self-worth

Selling is a numbers game. As Tom Hopkins, author of How to Master the Art of Selling, accurately suggests, great sales reps learn to love no. Ego resilience is the degree in which a person likes him or herself, and the ability to handle rejection. A person might have all of the skills and attributes for the position, but if they lack the resilience to handle rejection, they will ultimately fail. Eventually the baggage accumulated through defeat will force the person to give up.

No one person can be equally successful in every sales role; therefore you must determine what is the right mix of behaviors for your sales environment. We call this step, Job Modeling. It is the process of mapping the required behavioral traits with the key variables in the sales environment:

• Frequency of closes (sales)
• Lead generation
• Nature of customers
• Technical background
• Support

Coming back to our example of a person selling PC products to consumers we see an environment that provides lots of opportunities to close, and plenty of warm leads with prospects that are not interested in developing a relationship. In this role we look for people who are dominant in persuasive drive, empathy and urgency (low pace). These sales people move fast, try to close often and keep pushing on to their next prospect. While at the other extreme the enterprise sales person may only close two or three multi-million dollar deals per year. This role requires higher service drive and patience (high pace), because the sales person must work very closely with the customer for a long period of time to develop the appropriate solution.

Developing a Job Model is most effective when combined with a behavioral assessment tool. Since the most important talents you are hunting for in a sales person are not readily visible, an assessment tool will help you uncover a person’s inherent behavioral traits. A standard behavioral profile will provide accurate selection results and a method to measure all potential candidates with. Profiling your top sales people and blending their assessments into an ideal profile is the best method for creating the baseline. The baseline profile will allow you to compare potential candidates with your environment, and help you to assess if the person has what it takes to succeed.

Imagine what your numbers would be if each of your sales people were as good as your top performers. Not only would you be hitting huge numbers, but you would also reduce your operating costs, training costs and recruiting costs. One of the first things you will notice after developing an ideal sales profile is your source of sales candidates is no longer effective, but you will be armed with the information to go out and hunt for the right sales people. Even better, you will be better equipped to attract and hire these candidates, because you can sell to their unique needs and show them how they will succeed in your environment. Now that is an exciting prospect!