Do You Have a Sales Process – or a Sales Personality?

If your best salesperson disappeared tomorrow, could someone else step into the role and produce anything close to the same results?

If the answer is no, you may not have a sales process.

You may have a sales personality.

And personalities are difficult to duplicate.

Imagine you own a successful home-improvement company. You have three salespeople selling the same services to roughly the same kinds of customers.

One consistently closes about half of the appointments he runs.

The second closes about a third.

The third is personable, knowledgeable, punctual, and hardworking–but struggles to close one out of five.

Naturally, you want everyone performing like your best salesperson.

So you ask him to train the others.

He spends a few mornings explaining how he approaches customers, how he presents the company, and how he handles objections. Everyone listens. They take notes. They return to the field.

A month later, almost nothing has changed.

Your best salesperson is still your best salesperson.

The middle performer is still in the middle.

And the struggling salesperson is beginning to wonder whether he is cut out for sales at all.

That tells us something.

It just doesn't necessarily tell us what we think it does.

The talent-gap assumption

When one salesperson dramatically outperforms another, the obvious conclusion is that the better salesperson has more talent.

Sometimes that's exactly right.

Some people are more perceptive, more disciplined, better communicators, or simply better suited to sales.

But there's another possibility worth investigating.

Maybe your best salesperson has developed a repeatable way of selling that nobody has ever identified clearly enough to teach.

Picture him sitting across the kitchen table from a homeowner who is considering replacing her windows.

She says the price concerns her.

A less experienced salesperson may immediately begin defending the price, offering financing, or explaining the quality of the windows.

Your strongest salesperson asks another question.

"How long have you been thinking about replacing them?"

The homeowner explains that the upstairs bedrooms become uncomfortable during the summer and that several windows are difficult to open.

A few questions later, he discovers something important.

She isn't primarily worried about appearance.

She's worried about ventilation, comfort, and whether her children can safely operate the windows.

His presentation changes.

He spends less time on decorative options and more time explaining function, safety, airflow, and the differences between several window configurations.

By the time he reaches the price, the homeowner understands what she is buying and why it matters to her.

He hasn't simply presented windows.

He has helped her make a decision about her home.

Now ask him what he did.

He may say:

"I built rapport."

"I asked questions."

"I found the pain."

"I presented the solution."

All of that may be true.

It also doesn't tell the other salesperson very much.

The real skill was recognizing which questions mattered, understanding the answers, and adjusting the conversation accordingly.

Much of that judgment may be living inside his head.

The invisible process

This is where many small businesses get stuck.

They don't actually have a company sales process.

They have several people who have each developed their own version of selling.

One leads with price.

Another leads with technical knowledge.

Another wins customers primarily through personality.

None of those approaches is automatically wrong.

The problem is that the business has no common foundation beneath them.

I call this the invisible process: important things are happening, but nobody has defined them well enough to reproduce them intentionally.

Ask a few questions:

Does every salesperson understand the customer's problem before recommending a product?

Does every salesperson know which information must be gathered?

Do they explain the company's commitments consistently?

Do they understand what should happen when the customer isn't ready to buy today?

Does anyone know which parts of the conversation are consistently associated with successful sales?

If those answers vary dramatically from salesperson to salesperson, then sales performance is largely dependent on the person sitting in the chair.

That makes the company vulnerable.

Why "work harder" doesn't solve it

This is also why more effort is often a poor substitute for structure.

A salesperson can make twice as many calls, run twice as many appointments, and send twice as many follow-ups.

But if nobody understands what causes a good sales conversation to succeed, the business may simply create more activity around an undefined process.

It's the business equivalent of pressing harder on the accelerator without being completely sure where the road goes.

More activity may produce more sales.

It may also produce more inconsistency.

Don't clone the salesperson

The answer isn't to turn your best salesperson into a template and require everyone else to imitate his personality.

That usually creates a different problem.

A naturally outgoing salesperson and a quiet, analytical salesperson can both be excellent.

The objective isn't identical behavior.

It's consistent purpose.

Every salesperson may need to accomplish certain things during the conversation:

Understand why the customer is considering a purchase.

Identify what matters most to them.

Explain the appropriate options.

Set accurate expectations.

Establish a clear next step.

How each salesperson accomplishes those things may vary.

That's where personality belongs.

The structure defines what needs to happen.

The person decides how best to make it happen.

The question worth asking

Instead of asking only:

"Why didn't we close that deal?"

Ask:

"At what point did the customer's confidence change, and what happened immediately before that?"

That's a much more useful diagnostic question.

It begins separating luck, talent, customer fit, and process.

You may discover that your strongest salesperson does several important things instinctively that nobody else has been taught.

You may discover that another salesperson is missing a basic skill.

You may even discover that the difference has nothing to do with the salespeople at all.

That's why diagnosis comes first.

The objective isn't to prove that every performance problem is structural.

It's to understand what is producing the result before trying to change it.

Your best salesperson may be your greatest source of revenue.

He may also be showing you exactly where your business still depends on an individual instead of a system.