Many people believe that they can’t decode their top salespeople sell. We have a name for this in sales; we call them rainmakers. In the absence of knowing how they sell so well, we tell ourselves that it’s too complicated, and it just can’t be done. Well, it can now. Simulations can capture the best performances on video with analytics to explain how it works, with buyer feedback explaining why it works. This insight and example of selling can be broadcast to the whole salesforce in minutes rather than months. For the first time, you can now accurately decode and scale your top performers and rainmaker, and you do this by using simulations.
When you’re taught to navigate using a map, the most important thing to know is your present location. If you don’t know where you are, you can’t plan a route to where you want to be. Because of significant blind spots, most sales organizations on a journey of growth are struggling to locate their current location. As we’ve seen, Artificial Intelligence can help to reflect the mirror and help people to see their blind spots. But, many sales organizations also don’t know where they are going. They don’t definitively know what good looks like, and that’s why we have the term ‘rainmaker.’ Time and again, I’ve seen leaders with great intentions and playbooks from their last job tucked under their arms. They try to implement the playbook in a new company, and it doesn’t work because it’s just a guess that it will work as it did before. Simulations can quantitatively take the guesswork out of knowing where a sales population is now and where they need to be, and this allows us to create a formula for how we scale sales effectiveness.
With such a formula in our hands, if we build the sales playbook using that formula, will it work? Even if we have the formula for success, how do we make sure that the salespeople use it? After all, they have cognitive biases hardwired into their brains that sabotage the application of this formula. People are still people, and change is not easy for them. So, even if we have the optimal formula for sales success, we need to recognize that our job is to sell this to the sellers and drive adoption. But not everyone will be buying. As we’ll see, 90% of salespeople will struggle to change. Those who can buy-in have something Carol Dweck calls a ‘Growth Mindset,’ and next, we look at how we can influence and drive just that.