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 Surprising First Step on the Path to Becoming a Sales Rainmaker
Regardless of where you are in your sales career, you’re probably familiar with the feeling of wishing you were accomplishing just a little bit more. From those who are new to the business to the professionals at the top of their organizations, the desire to increase sales, take control of your career path, and enjoy a higher standard of living is almost universal.
And yet, it’s something that millions of salespeople struggle to make much progress on.
Part of the reason has to do with the way so many of us think of the path to becoming a Rainmaker – one of those sales professionals who operates in the top few percentages of income and revenue in their industry, accounting for the lion’s share of the biggest accounts and commissions.
A lot of salespeople – even very experienced ones – think that the first step to becoming a top performer is setting goals, improving your closing ratio, or maybe even just making more new contacts each week. While all of those are important, none matters as much as the one simple thing that needs to come before anything else: changing your mindset.
If you want to get different results, you have to think differently than you ever have in the past. That’s important, because a lot of salespeople never pick up on this point, and so they become “stuck” in one phase of their career and do not progress. As a result, they never pick up on an underlying truth: that truly successful salespeople aren’t just offering products and services to their customers… they’re becoming catalysts for change.
Stop and think about that for a moment. Rather than thinking about making money, Rainmakers look for ways to improve their customers businesses and lives; instead of trying to force an order, they simply do their best to let business relationships start and grow where they make sense; they don’t worry so much about selling products as they do finding the right solutions. As a result, they become the kinds of salespeople that others wish they were.
So….., if you truly want to become a Rainmaker, stop worrying about what you haven’t done and start thinking about what you could be – to yourself, your customers, and your company. It’s not always easy to make this transition, but it’s totally worth the effort. That’s because once this shift has been made, the financial rewards, and not to mention the prestige and career flexibility that come with high sales performance, start to happen naturally.
If you want to make it to the highest level in the sales profession, and enjoy all the benefits that come with it, learn to start thinking the way Rainmakers do.
Happy Selling!