Sales Success: Why Personality Is Overrated and Process is Key

Most people believe that all great salespeople embody a specific persona.

You know the type.

Confident. Sociable. Outgoing. Heard before seen.

The quintessential extravert.

Jarrod Best-Mitchell was born this person.

In fact, scribbled at the bottom of his report card were those all too familiar words every extraverted child has heard before:

“Jarrod talks too much!”

Those same traits deemed disruptive and unsuitable for learning environments were the exact attributes that some believe allowed him to excel in his current profession.

As a successful sales coach who has trained 100s of sales professionals, generated over 2 million organic views of content and regularly delivers scripts on the fly, Jarrod firmly believes it is not personality but process that makes a salesperson great.

During his interview feature on The Value, he shared the key elements of selling that you’ll need to know if you want to excel in a sales career.

Set Goals & Nurture a Positive Mindset

Goal setting is critical to achieving success in any arena. What goes hand in hand with this is the internal conversations you have with yourself about achieving those goals.

Sales can be a daunting career as much of the work involves persuading persons to buy a product/service, buy it from you and act urgently on the opportunity. A multitude of obstacles, many of which are out of your locus of control, stand in the way of you taking persons from initial contact to final sale.

Positive self-talk is crucial in keeping you committed to the process and in driving you toward successful actions.

Jarrod considers “try” a word of doubt.

Instead, he affirms, “I am going to hit target”, then proceeds to write down the goals he wants to achieve but also writes down what he wants customers to tell him such as “we have the budget to take on this project.”

Become an Expert

The next step to becoming an excellent salesperson is becoming an expert about your product or service by improving your product and service knowledge.

Forbes explains why knowledge is important in sales.

Firstly, customers are more likely to believe your product or service is best for them if they are convinced you are an expert.

Secondly, your customer service rating is improved when clients believe they can rely on you to answer the questions they might have.

When you expand your knowledge of the things you sell you can establish credibility and build trust with potential customers. The confidence inspired in prospects from your commitment to becoming an expert can aid in moving prospects quickly along the sales funnel.

Understand your Buyer

Renowned sales coach Victor Antonio states that in order to influence prospective customers to buy, you need to take time to understand them. Understand what’s important to them, what triggers them to buy and what they need from you so you can offer solutions that gently nudge them into making a decision.

The best way to understand your buyer is by asking questions. While you may not always have the opportunity to interrogate every prospect you encounter, you can develop a buyer persona based on interactions with a few of your early clients. Future interactions can be used to refine the persona you’ve developed.

The Value host, Kevin Valley, offered a list of questions you may want to consider asking customers to improve your understanding of them and craft sales pitches hinged on a well-developed buyer persona:

1. What are your top 3 problems?
2. What stresses you out?
3. If you could have a break from something what would that be?
4. If you find yourself worrying, what is it about?
5. If you could fix one thing in your life or business, what would that be?
6. What do you wish you had more of?
7. What do you wish you had less of?
8. As you think about where you are in life and business, why don’t you already have it?
9. If funding was not a problem, what would be the first thing you would invest in for your business and life?

As a rule of thumb, the more questions you ask the more value you can provide. The key is to always dig deeper.

Why?

Well, most people who need their problems solved don’t understand what solutions can solve their problems. They are also unable to recognize what their actual problem is and instead speak to symptoms.

As a sales professional, you should never take the first answer from the customer as to what is the problem, but search past the shallow responses to formulate a clear picture of their true difficulty.

Another foolproof way to identify your ideal client is to visit your competitor’s social media page and look at the type of people interacting with the business.

Who are they? Is it mostly men or women? Students or workers? Professionals or business owners? Single or married? Do they have children? How old are they? Which social media platforms are they most likely to use?

Any profile information that helps you to build a buyer persona should be collected.

You should then craft an introductory message that speaks to that persona, and showcases the benefits of your product or service as well as what differentiates you from competitors.

Use Video Content as the Focal Point of Your Sales Strategy

In the digital age, understanding how to effectively use digital platforms to reach potential customers is crucial to business success.

The social media space constantly shapeshifts as different apps compete for consumer attention and media spend. From a digital marketing perspective, understanding which forms of content typically perform best for your needs is key to developing a successful sales strategy.

With that being said, video content is the fastest way to build trust and authority with strangers and as such should be the focal point of your sales strategy.

Instagram’s Platform Chief, Adam Mosseri, recently shared that reels are driving the most engagement on the app. They account for approximately 33.8% of the estimated reach on the platform and 35.4% of likes.

Additionally, Hootsuite indicates that LinkedIn native video posts earn three times the engagement of text posts on average and shared that brands that use video marketing are able to improve their revenue 49 percent faster than companies that don’t.

In short, video content is King!

Jarrod Best-Mitchell adds that if you have a good message, the length doesn’t matter, but if your aim is to be consistent, 30-45 seconds is a great time frame.

Keeping messages succinct and clear requires that you write out what you want to talk about, and then speak on one paragraph or topic in each video.

Many businesses make the mistake of creating content focused on them. However, when crafting an introductory message, your communication should always be centred on what you can do for your clients.

You should then craft an introductory message that speaks to that persona, and showcases the benefits of your product or service as well as what differentiates you from competitors.

Maintaining the same message makes it easy to repeat over and over as you understand the value of the outcome being created.

If you’re genuinely scared of producing it yourself, hire someone to do it for you. Opting not to create video content is agreeing to lose a huge chunk of sales.

Jarrod shared that he has sent out over 6,000 personalized videos with a 30-40% response rate. Videos can be seen and not gain a response while still making an impact. As such, video content should be approached as an exercise in brand building that speaks to your buyer’s desires and lets them know what you can do for them.

This strategy has resulted in 100% inbound sales with prospects coming to him ready to do business.

These are the first four elements of an effective sales strategy. In our next article, we’ll discuss which types of customers you should try to convert, the importance of data in solving problems and how to price appropriately.