RAINMAKER SERIES: Becoming a top sales professional – a Rainmaker – is a goal many sales professionals have. Rainmakers know that being at the top of their game builds business, impacts relationships, and generates superior customer loyalty and referral. The series that follow will explore the characteristics and behaviors that top sales professionals embrace. We hope you find this series of short informal discussions around excellence in the sales role to be useful and thought-provoking.
The First Thing You Always Need To Find New Customers
We have mentioned before that there’s a very popular misconception that the very best salespeople are “simply born that way.” One of the reasons so many people think that’s the case is the perception many of us have about the very best salespeople: that they’re hard-charging, Type-A personalities that just won’t take “no” for an answer.
While being focused on your goals is an important characteristic for anyone in sales, being overly aggressive with clients and prospects is not… what separates RAINMAKERS from their average-selling peers isn’t being abrasive, it’s being persistent.
That might sound like a subtle difference, but it’s more important than you might think. That’s because an overly-aggressive salesperson is one who turns off customers with his or her demeanor, only thinking about their own personal wishes, rather than the best fit for the buyer. One who is persistent, however, doesn’t try to increase sales by pushing over prospects, but by creating enough opportunities to ensure that they will always have a full sales pipeline.
In other words, they aren’t focused on any one or two sales because they are continually looking for new opportunities to work. They have an established system that includes activities like cold calling, networking, social media, and other strategies that they use as they continue to grow – even when it doesn’t seem like they need more business. They remain consistent because they know it’s the best way to take the guesswork out of their futures.
Determination to meet your personal expectations, not just those given to you by your sales manager, is the first thing you always need to find new customers. Without it, you are relying on luck, or possibly a flash of inspiration, to get to where you are trying to go in your life and career. Offices all around the world are filled with salespeople who don’t have the vision or commitment to get to where they say they want to be. But until they develop enough internal desire to keep them continually looking for new customers – until they become sales hunters in the truest sense of the word – they won’t be ready to become Rainmakers yet.
Train yourself to break out of the up-and-down cycle that so many salespeople feel like they’re caught in by developing the attitude that you always need to be looking for new business, regardless of how full your sales pipeline is. This perpetual hunting attitude is the first thing you need to find a lot of new customers, and also an important step towards becoming a RAINMAKER.
Happy Selling!
RAINMAKER! (Book) – Making the Leap from Salesperson to Sales Catalyst