Sales managers and their teams want to do a great job. They want to improve their bottom-line results while outstripping their last greatest performance. That’s a wish. Reality is that a lot of things can get in the way of that wish. Everyone knows it’s a tough world, but traditional goal-setting and self-improvement mantras would have you focus on sales goals, fixing selling flaws, taking deep breaths to relax and working the system come hell or high water.

Now, according to a growing number of personal-achievement experts, traditional assumptions about high performance could be holding you back. Yes, it’s true. It’s a new ballgame – one you can win. “There is a general misunderstanding in the way that psychology is applied to business,” explains Rice University’s Dr. John Eliot, author of Overachievement (Portfolio, 2004). “For the last 200 years, the field of psychology has been based on trying to identify problems and abnormality and remove them. The problem is, people who are healthy and successful have dreams and want to be great at what they do. By definition, they want to get as far to the upper end of the continuum of human performance as possible, which means becoming abnormal in some sense. Ultimately, this means traditional psychology techniques are essentially myths…they don’t apply to people who want to be at the tail end of the distribution.”

Goal setting is one example. Traditionally, goal visualization has been a fundamental element in the achievement toolkit. The problem is that a goal is an outcome, and when researchers study high performers, they find the best of the best are focused on the process, not the outcome.

“The best achievers really get caught up in what they enjoy about the work itself,” says Eliot. “The best salesmen love the competition; they love the pressure moment when the sale is on; they really get into the flow and the rhythm of conversation and communicating. If they do that stuff great, the sale happens as a byproduct. But goal setting will focus you on the sale outcome, which is really backwards from where you need to be."

The deleterious effect of stress is another achievement myth. It turns out that stress itself is an essential ingredient of high performance. What makes it harmful is how we perceive it.

“The whole stress-management movement is great, if we are trying to help people recover from ulcers,” says Eliot. “But for professionals, the moment of opportunity – the moment of greatest potential – is a moment of stress, a moment of high pressure. The people who are most successful look for moments of pressure. They try to create more moments of pressure in their day and revel in those moments.”

Eliot’s research reveals the stress that comes with these kinds of pressure moments does not necessarily cause detrimental physiological changes, such as the release of excess cortisol, which causes ulcers, graying hairs and fat storage. Instead, it depends on how the stress is perceived. When we look at the situation as a positive one, with the potential for enjoyment or excitement, stress can be healthy.

“So the notion that whenever you get in a pressure moment you need to take a deep breath, close your eyes, imagine yourself in a calm place and reduce the pressure actually reduces the enthusiasm and the excitement and the thrill of the moment,” says Eliot. “What we really need people doing is increasing the thrill and engaging in more pressure moments, but learning how to interpret those moments as exciting opportunities for growth.”

Sales systems can also be barriers to high achievement, according to Marcus Buckingham, the best-selling author of The One Thing You Need to Know (Free Press, 2005). He thinks the opportunity-management systems used by many companies often have a negative side effect: they institutionalize mediocre performance.

“If somebody is brilliant at building relationships, but he hates cold calling – is not a good cold caller at all – the best advice to this guy is to stop cold calling,” says Buckingham. “When companies define a standard way of selling and put in place performance-management systems that measure how many calls are made, how many product demonstrations given, etc., they end up with an awful lot of salespeople going through preset motions.”

If the traditional wisdom is incorrect, how do you achieve your personal best? Here’s what the experts counsel.


First, stop doing what you don’t like.
Surveys have found that only 17 percent of Americans spend most of their days doing things they enjoy. Further, 59 percent of Americans believe that the secret to success is to identify their flaws and fix them.

“Unfortunately most salespeople in America are not trying to cut out of their lives the things that grate on them or frustrate them or bore them or drain them,” says Buckingham. “Instead, they are actually focusing on those things in the erroneous belief that if they could just learn to love them, they’ll shine.”

This suggests that most sales professionals are spending a disproportionate amount of their time in activities they don’t enjoy and are not good at. “You will never experience your personal best if you are not spending 70 percent to 75 percent of your time doing things for which you have some natural appetite,” says Buckingham. “Excellence is a function of learning and growth and development and progress, and that means a lot of practice and a lot of effort. And in order to be able to sustain that, you have got to have an appetite for it.”

In practical terms, this means focusing on those phases of the sales process that best match your abilities and finding alternative methods for completing those phases that don’t. It might also mean finding a new position that matches your strengths. If you are a top-flight influencer, consider a job that requires relationship-building skills, such as pharmaceutical sales. If you love to close, look for a short-cycle product, such as car sales.


Second, learn how to get into the zone.
Once you are focused on what you do best, it’s time to get into the zone. You know, that place where you and the customer are in perfect sync, and closing the sale is effortless.

Sound like a mythical place? Not according to psychologist Pam Brill, author of The Winner’s Way (McGraw-Hill, 2004). Brill says you can get into the sales zone by mixing the perfect high-performance cocktail for whatever situation you face. This cocktail has three ingredients.

First, the activation ingredient is your physicality. “We all know if we are sweating bullets. We all know if our jaw is getting tighter or if our toes are curled or if our back hurts. We tend to carry activation in our lower back. Do you feel your lower back getting that knot in it?” asks Brill. “That is a hint that it’s time to reposture and to breathe. Even just a smile, a slight smile, is something that can reactivate you and get you back into that sensation of being connected and confident.”

Second, the attitude ingredient consists of beliefs and assumptions you bring to the sale. “Attitude can either set us up to really get in that zone and do our best, or it can derail us and put us in that other state where subpar, also-rans are the norm,” says Brill. “Attitude is about confidence. When we believe in ourselves, when we have a sense of meaning, when we feel confident, then we get that attitude that I can do this.”

Third, the attention ingredient is your focus. “It’s what we focus on, and it’s also what we screen out. When we are in that place athletes call the zone, our attention is keyed in and focused, zoomed in on the essentials. Everything else seems to slip away to a dull white noise,” explains Brill. “Whatever we are tuned into becomes our point of view, our perspective. It becomes our reality. At times when we are really ramped up, we zoom in on a very narrow field. We feel less, we see less and we don’t think as strategically or smartly. So we need to refocus our attention.”

These three a’s combine together to determine your performance, but there is no one perfect combination. Rather, you need to learn to alter the mix, depending on the situation you face and the personality and needs of the customer.

“It’s not one size fits all. It is learning how to identify what activation level you want for this sales call, where you want to be focused and what your attitudes are when you are genuinely engaged,” says Brill. “By aligning these three a’s properly, my clients have been able to get into that state where everything is flowing and connecting. When you reach your personal best, the wins are really just side effects of that authentic engagement and connection.”


Third, stop thinking and start selling.
Yogi Berra articulated a final important achievement insight when he told Yankee manager Casey Stengel, “I can’t think and hit at the same time.” It turns out that when you spend too much time thinking about how well you are doing, your performance levels may well decline.

“We know that the great performers at the moment when they are performing – at the moment the phone rings, at the moment they engage a client – have to be free of evaluation and judgment,” explains Rice University’s Eliot. “We lose our ability to perceive what is going on around us when we are busy evaluating ourselves and consciously thinking through the process. Your mind works too much, you get yourself tied up, it makes it difficult to speak and we get a lot of stuff that we associate with choking. A salesperson can’t be evaluating the sale and evaluating technique and selling at the same time.”

Instead, Eliot recommends that sales professionals adopt a trusting mind-set whenever the rubber hits the road. They should ignore goals and self-evaluation and instead, concentrate on being in the moment.

“We call it the trusting mind-set, because it’s associated with going on your instincts, relying on your training, rather than being conscious, and being intentional and having a lot of brain activity,” Eliot says. “The trusting mind-set is a very quiet mind. It’s free of evaluation and judgment – as opposed to being in there and trying to control the strings of the sale like you are a puppet master.”

This is not to say that judgment and evaluation do not play an important role in personal achievement. Instead, they should be separated from the act of selling itself. If you reserve your evaluation to do at the end of the day on Friday or do it the last hour of each day – and not during the day when you are engaged in sales – says Eliot, “then not only are you doing the right type of evaluation, but you are doing it in the right percentage.”

“It is the difference between being a performer and being a preparer,” he continues. “We know in any profession the more time you spend engaged in the activity that matters, the better you are going to be. If you spend five hours a week playing golf and four of those five hours are spent on the range hitting balls and working on your swing, that one hour when you are playing, you are going to be stiff. You are going to be mechanical, and your mind is going to be working too much. You are going to be what we call a practice player. The same thing holds in sales. If you want to be great at sales, sell, sell, sell.” •

Three Tips for Staying on Top
Sales trainer and communication expert Dianna Booher, author of From Contact to Contract (Dearborn, 2003), offers these insights drawn from her experiences with high-performing salespeople.
• Connect to your passion. “Once you get near the top of your selling game, you have to have somewhere else to go or you are going to lose interest in it,” warns Booher. “Money only provides that motivation to a certain level. Once you get to the top and you have all the money you want, then you have got to look for that personal passion. Maybe it’s taking your product or service and using it to accomplish a new goal for a client. Or maybe you’re taking your expertise and applying it to a new industry. It’s those things that not everybody else is doing, that is what people get passionate about.”
• Never stop looking for an edge. “Top performers never stop and say, ‘Okay, I have mastered this fundamental,’” says Booher. “They are the ones who are back time after time, asking, how can I change my proposal? If I did this to my key points and structured it in this different way, how do you think that would change the reaction? It’s those little-bitty-tweaky questions and observations that put them at the top. And they are willing to work on them just like at their first selling job.”
• Broaden your horizons. “People who are narrowly focused cannot see to grow their market share,” explains Booher. “You have people who focus on their one specialty and they are great at that, but you get to the top of that rung. People get so focused on their industry that they also lose awareness about what people in general are thinking as buyers. You have to be kept generally aware of what is going on in the whole realm of selling, not just in your industry, and you need a general awareness of people’s emotional, physical, spiritual and mental states to be able to continue to connect with them.”