CHAPTER 1
Success Starts With the Growth Equation
Universal Truth #1: Top salespeople share a willingness to take responsibility for their weaknesses, a deep curiosity about their customers and the world, and a desire for mastery. They commit to using what theyâve learned about their processes to continue improving. When you master this âgrowth equationâ you will not only improve your sales record, you will transform your life.
When I was about 30, I heard about a sales opportunity at Marriott. Fortunately, I was hired, because it was there that I met my first sales mentor.
Motivational speaker and author Marcus Buckingham, formerly with the Gallup Organization, once said, âPeople donât leave jobs, they leave managers.â1 As for me, I stayed and thrived with Marriott because of one man: Greg Willingham.
Greg grew up in the land business and was what Bostonians call âwicked smaht.â It was because of Greg that I was able to rise through the ranks at Marriott, eventually becoming the top salesperson and going on to help lead the top sales team in the company.
That didnât mean working for Greg was easyâfar from it. There was no messing around in his salesroom. Sales meetings started every morning at 8:00 a.m. sharp. If you werenât in your seat, you got no customers that day. Thatâs right, not one lead. The reason for your tardiness didnât matter. One day, a company bulldozer rammed into my colleagueâs Subaru while he was pulling into the parking lot.
No leads.
Greg wasnât interested in reasons. âI hire the best salespeople I can find,â he said. âI donât want to spend my time listening to excuses.â Greg taught me the most valuable lesson of my careerâthe three goals of any sales encounter:
- Make the customer feel better about you and your company than they did before you met.
- Make a sale.
- If the customer doesnât buy, find out the real reason. Learn from it, accept responsibility, and donât make the same mistake again.
Itâs the third rule that Iâve found to be the most important and, often, the most painful. The moment you really start to take responsibility for your actions, you will feel the pain of failures more acutely than before. But you will also learn from each experience so youâll never make the same mistakes again.
This willingness to look at your mistakes requires curiosity. The most successful people Iâve encountered arenât afraid to say, âYes, I messed up, but what did I do wrong? Whatâs the lesson? How can I get better?â They know they might not win back a lost sale or fix a mistake, but they do commit to changing their behavior next time.
How? By taking a good look at their habits and by being vulnerable enough to admit whatâs working and what isnât. The willingness to learn and grow is what leads to true mastery.
The Growth Equation
Responsibility, curiosity, and mastery make up what I refer to as the growth equationâand top performers understand and practice this universal truth.
Why is a commitment to growth such a necessary component of selling with heart? Because when we take responsibility, we draw people in rather than pushing them away. Increased curiosity creates more authentic relationships. By mastering sales techniques, you will live in the moment with your customers and be present to their needs and emotions.
Work on all three of these things and your connections will be deeper and your paycheck will be bigger. Of course, you have to first believe that this kind of growth is even possible.
Make a commitment to growthâand surround yourself with others whoâve done the same.
For years I thought that sales skills were either something you were born with or not. I figured that my talents, much like my frizzy black hair, were facts of life.
In her bestselling book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Stanford Business School professor Carol Dweck presents a powerful way of looking at success. High achievers possess more than intelligence and talent. In addition, they all have a commitment to growth and continual learning.
Dweck says that people have either one of two types of âmindsetsâ that have a powerful impact on how they conduct their lives.2 The first group of peopleâthose with a fixed mindsetâbelieve that their qualities and abilities are static. They think thereâs a limit to their basic talents and nothing can change that. As a result, they feel a deep urgency to prove themselves to others.
We all know people stuck in a fixed mindset. They say things like:
- Iâm not good at math.
- I donât remember peopleâs names.
- Iâm not a natural salesperson.
- I donât do technology.
- Iâm not interested in politics!
- No one finds me attractive.
- Iâm not the athletic type.
Because those with fixed mindsets arenât curious to learn more and often donât put in the effort to become masters in their fields; they hide behind false bravado. They try to mask their deficiencies, instead of trying to overcome them.
People with growth mindsets, on the other hand, believe that their basic qualities âare things you can cultivate through toil and persistence.â3 These people are energized by learning and invigorated by overcoming failure. To them, life is a journey of gathering new information, making new connections, asking for constructive feedback, and learning from painful lessons.
A passion for stretching themselves is the hallmark of those with a growth mindset.
A perfect example of someone with a growth mindset was Benjamin Franklin. The consistent theme in Franklinâs life was self-improvement. As the brother of seven, and the child of a poor candle maker, he had less than two years of formal education and yet he became one of the wealthiest, most respected intellectuals of the 18th century.4
From an early age, Franklin read everything he could. He loved the knowledge he found in books and in 1727 formed a club called the Junto, a structured forum to discuss and debate intellectual and worldly topics with fellow club members.
Learning about the world was obviously important to Franklinâbut so was spending time with other thinkers and community leaders who were as curious and committed to learning as he was.
Think for a moment about the people you surround yourself with: Are they people who inspire you and fuel your energy, or do they just suck the life out of you?
My (former) friend Cindy always had a health issue, a problem with her ex-husband, or a gripe about her mother. I somehow became her sounding board and her bartender, listening to her sob stories over too many bottles of wine. Alas, Cindy would never do anything about her situation. She preferred complaining to therapy, and victimization to optimization. When I finally realized there was nothing I could do to help her until she started to help herself, we parted ways.
The next time you find yourself feeling stuck in a fixed mindset, think about what you might do to step outside yourself and learn from your mistakes. Think about those colleagues and friends who strive for improvement, and ask yourself if youâre spending enough time helping each other grow.
This commitment to growth and the bonds you form with other growth-minded colleagues will pave the way for you to master the growth equation.
Responsibility
At one of my consulting workshops, I kicked off the first morning by greeting
each salesperson by name. They all replied with the same good cheer.
All but one.
Instead of saying hello, Linda was quick to make excuses as to why she wasnât having any luck with the previous dayâs assignments.
âThe prospects are terrible,â she said. âThey donât buy.â
The second morning, it was the same thing.
âGood morning,â I called out. âWhat a grand day!â
But it was never a grand day for Linda.
âThese leads are NQs!â she hissed. (NQ is short for ânot qualified.â)
Who does that, I wondered. Who blames everyone and everything but themselves for their lack of sales?
Actually, a lot of people do. Many salespeople blame external circumstances for their lack of success. But when we do this, we erode our own power.
Weâve all met chronic blamersâreactive people who limit their ability to take control of their lives. Reactive salespeople are easy to spot. They use phrases such as:
- I canât help it.
- They didnât have the money.
- Itâs marketingâs fault.
- I donât have the time.
- I never get any support.
Often, chronic blamers are fearful about their job securityâand for good reason. Take Linda, for example. Her organization had more than 500 salespeople who all worked together at the same office. Every month they had awards for the top three salespeople. Linda had never been close to the top; in fact, she was always in the bottom 10.
But an interesting thing happened during the course of the seminar. The techniques I was sharing resonated with Linda and, just two weeks later, she went from number 125 on her team to number two. Around the time the awards were announced, I noticed Linda in the back of the room on a little brown chair, writing feverishly on a yellow pad.
I asked her what she was doing.
âWriting my speech,â she said. âIâm going to share with everyone what I did to win the number two slot.â
I congratulated Linda for improving her sales record, but I also told her what I tell salespeople all over the world:
We canât take the glory for being great if we wonât take the responsibility when weâre not.
Remember: Linda wasnât blaming herself for being number 125âshe was blaming the customers. So although I was thrilled to congratulate her for her victory, I warned her that she needed to be equally willing to take responsibility the next time customers werenât buying.
Top salespeople never blame external factors for their lack of success. They know that, even as a veteran, you can go from having a great month where everyoneâs buying to one where you canât sell anyone anything. You try everything, but you canât even talk your dog into going for a walk. As Eric Greitens writes in his book Resilience, âWhile fear can be your friend, excuses are almost always your enemy. Faced with a choice between hard action and easy excuses people often choose the excuse. . . . Excellence is difficult. An excuse is seductive.â5
People who sell from the heart never blame external factors for their lack of success. They hold themselves accountable and, as a result, they consistently improve.
You can have the greatest sales system in the world, but if you wonât take responsibility for your own success, in the end, it wonât matter.
When Organizations Play the Blame Game
If the failure to take responsibility can prevent an otherwise talented salesperson from growing, it can mean the death of an organization. Yet, in too many companies, the blame game runs rampant. A single chronic blamer can turn an entire culture into a game of finger pointing and âItâs your fault, not mineâ thinking.
A few years ago, I sat with a group of senior leaders who werenât meeting their quotas. They were struggling to get salespeople to prospect correctly and to isolate objections.
I met with the leadership team separately and asked them to identify what they saw as the major issue.
âThe salespeople just donât listen,â they complained. âWe tell them over and over again what to do and it goes in one ear and out the other.â
âReally?â I said. I was shocked. âWhoâs in charge of training here?â
There was an awkward silence.
âWe are,â one of them responded.
âTheyâre looking to you for leadership and direction,â I said. âThey rely on you to provide mentorship and accountability! And youâre blaming them?â
Next, I met with the sales team. Their biggest beef with management was that they werenât providing enough support or guidance about how to close.
âItâs their fault,â they complained.
Really? Doesnât anybody in this company want to accept some responsibility? Apparently not.
No matter where you sit in an organization, blaming others is always a bad idea, not simply because it alienates people, because itâs lazy, or because it robs you of respect. Thereâs a deeper reasonâone that wonât just cause short-term problems, but will destroy your organizationâs chance at long-term growth:
Blaming other people and external circumstances prevents you from learning, and it prevents your company from growing.
You can start to take more responsibility immediately by changing your self-talk and the questions you ask yourself. Consider the following alternatives to some old standby excuses:
- âThey didnât have the money.â Instead, think about where you could have improved. For example, âI didnât show them the value. Did I find a problem? Was it big enough?â
- âTheyâre indecisive.â Maybe, but what could you have done differently? âI didnât make enough of a connection. What else could I have done to build trust?â
- âSomeone gave them a better deal.â Instead of blaming your competitors, keep your focus on you. âI didnât differentiate our offering. What are the power statements I could have used to better differentiate my offer?â
Despite years of training myself to take responsibility, I still find myself asking accusatory questions like âWho took my car keys?â or âWho left the milk out?â My default mechanism is often to blame. I sometimes think thatâs ...