Relationships are not the key to Sales Success!
For those of you who love statistics, you will love this article as it is based on empirical statistical data. For those of you who think relationships are the differentiating factor for sales success, you will be awakened.
As most of you know I have been a Certified Partner for Objective Management Group since 1995. And for the past 9 years I’ve also been responsible for on-boarding new partners and coaching 90% of the partners in North and South America. I also work directly with my own clients. I’m not one of those guys that says “do what I did”. I would never suggest anyone to do anything I haven’t seen to be effective first hand.
In my role as Coach of OMG partners and in my role as Certified Partner with OMG, I believe it is critically important to stay up with the ever-changing world of sales. This means doing your best to keep up with Dave Kurlan who, in my opinion, is the World’s Best Sales Leader, in thought and action. No, I’m not sucking up, I’m dead serious. If Dave were not the true sales leader and I didn’t learn something from him at every encounter, I would have moved on a long time ago. I bleed OMG, I live it and breathe it! When I find nuggets of insight based on science I like to share it, incorporate it, and help others.
About this time last year the dynamic OMG team created a statistics tool search engine. This search engine allows us to select fields and points of data then search the entire database of 1 million plus sales and sales leadership evaluations. In one of my recent entrepreneur evenings I began playing around with the statistics tool and was amazed at the outcome.
Here was the premise: Relationships are the most important skill to sales success, therefore, relationship skills are the most important differentiating factor between seasoned, successful, elite sales people, and newbies. Below are the quires and screen shots of the results from the Statistics Analyzer.
Top 10% of Sales People – focus on the Relationship Skills finding. The graph shows the top 10% of Salespeople have 54% of the Relationship Skills we measure.
The bottom 10% of Salespeople – again focus on the Relationship Skills findings. The graph shows the bottom 10% of Salespeople have 49% of the Relationship Skills we measure.
Not much of a difference when you compare the top 10% to the bottom 10%.
We are not saying Relationship Skills are not important to sales. We are saying Relationship Skills are not significantly different between top and bottom performers. Therefore, the premise is NOT TRUE. When great emphasis is placed on Relationship Skills, there is no statistical difference and it has no bearing on sales success!
If you are hiring for sales and this would be helpful in identifying the right new person to on-board, sign up for a Free Trial.
What other interesting findings do you see when comparing the top 10% to the bottom 10%?
Would you like to see how your top performers compare to your bottom performers? Hit me up here.
How would having a team of top 10%’s impact you and your business?