Follow These Best Sales Tips From Top Performers

BY Jessica Helinski
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When it comes to sales advice, the best sales tips come from proven winners. A recent study of top-​performing sellers reveals which tactics, practices and approaches you should embrace to boost your own success. After examining 100 skills and behaviors across 13 categories, the professionals at RAIN Group shared their findings, including the:

  1. most "surprising" driver of top performance
  2. most common factor of top performance 

Look to top sellers for the best sales tips

Logically, you want to model your own behaviors on those who are successful at selling. But who are these reps? And what makes them successful? RAIN Group first identified just who made up their top-​performer list. These sellers:

  • Met their annual goal
  • Achieved an average proposal win rate of 72%
  • Were 1.7 times more likely to achieve premium pricing

How do they do it? 

RAIN Group highlighted common behaviors among the top performers, and one vital factor came as a surprise. “Perhaps the most surprising finding of our research is the correlation between sellers’ productivity behaviors and habits and their likelihood to be Top-​Performing Sellers,” they explain. While productivity is always considered important to all successes, it has a significant impact in the sales industry. Specifically, the top sellers are significantly more likely than the rest to:

  • Focus on their agenda and not get derailed by others 
  • Change habits when needed to improve results
  • Maximize activities that drive the most results
  • Get the most done and produced in the time available

The most successful reps can identify and prioritize what works best for them, and they are able to avoid being distracted. These behaviors may seem like obvious best practices, but RAIN Group points out that efforts to boost productivity may be missing the mark. “The conversation often focuses on technologies that can help sellers work faster and spend less time on non-​selling activities, but it often doesn’t focus on how sellers work, day in and day out, to produce the best results,” they write. “It should.”

The best sales advice emphasizes that it is behaviors, habits and commitment that drive productivity. As SalesFuel’s Tim Londergan notes, “You must understand the discipline of better productivity will only be reached with equal parts enthusiasm and commitment. Once achieved, let the reward of productivity launch the motivation to repeat.”

While tools and technology can help, focusing only on those aspects of boosting productivity is misguided. 

Top sellers all do this more strongly than others

RAIN today found a common factor of top performance. Of all the success criteria they studied, only one achieved most criteria: understanding and strongly making a case for value. Their research revealed that the best sales reps clearly understand the value that they can deliver to each prospect and then pass that understanding on to the buyers. The ability to resonate, differentiate and substantiate are what sets these sellers apart from the rest. They are more likely to: 

  • Make and communicate strong ROI and financial cases for buyers (resonate)
  • Make the differentiation case for their offerings compellingly (differentiate)
  • Inspire confidence in buyers that they’ll achieve desired results by buying from them (substantiate)

To be a top seller, one must prioritize value-​case making. Much of SalesFuel’s own best sales tips focus on the importance of showing value from the very beginning. And this latest research aligns with this advice; proving value is irrefutably tied to top sales performance and credibility.

Photo by RODNAE Productions


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