Sink or Swim

When I was a young lad, I used to swim. I was pretty strong at three strokes: freestyle, breaststroke and butterfly. But I wasn't that good at backstroke and I always placed towards the back of the pack in my backstroke heats.

Then, one day, a professional swimming coach came to our school, taught me the right backstroke technique and gave me some useful training drills to improve my style and speed. Over the following months, I practised and practised and practised until I reached a point where no one could beat me at backstroke in my age group and the age group above me.

I think that learning to swim is a lot like learning to sell. A lot of sales people are thrown in the proverbial deep end with minimal training and guidance and asked to learn on the job. Some people sink, some people swim.

Those who learn how to swim (sell), are often not swimming (selling) optimally. They may be strong in one or two strokes (skills), but they are underdeveloped in key areas which let them down (like my backstroke technique).

Recent research from Gong Labs shows that the best salespeople aren’t significantly better than everyone else in any particular skill, but they are marginally better in all the sales skills. This has a compounding effect on their results.

Think about it. It doesn't matter how good you are at prospecting - if you’re not effective at presenting, the deals in your pipeline will stall. Similarly, even the best closer won't win a sale if their prospecting isn’t up to scratch and they don’t have anyone to sell to.

In order to amplify the performance of your sales people, you need to leverage their strengths and improve their weaknesses. Unfortunately, the sink or swim approach to professional development that most companies take significantly limits sales performance.

I'm interested in your thoughts. What's your approach to improving the performance of your sales team?

Mark Windust is an influential Thought Leader in the areas of Sales Strategy, Sales Leadership and Sales Performance. Since launching his consulting practice in 2007, Mark has worked with 1000's of business leaders, salespeople and entrepreneurs’ to help them transform their sales results.