3 Predictors of Sales Success

by Ben Lai | Oct 9, 2018

Transcript: Hi guys, it’s Ben Lai from Sales Ethos, thanks for joining us. Today I’m going to talk about the three top psychological predictors of sales success. If you’re a salesperson, work on these three areas so that you can improve your performance and the longevity of your career.

If you’re a hiring manager, a sales manager, or a business owner, and you’re looking to recruit a sales person, use these criteria to determine whether the person is a good fit for your company.

1. Predictors of Sales Success – Growth Mindset

Number one is the growth mindset. This was made popular by Carol Dweck. What she described was the ability to acknowledge where a person is, but then having a mindset that “Hey, I can always improve!” This completely goes against the idea that “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” In fact, you CAN teach old dogs new tricks, and you CAN teach humans new tricks too! The only people who cannot are those who are closed minded.

So for sales people, you want to make sure that they are willing to constantly improve. If they’re using sales techniques that were effective 10 years ago, they’re not going to be very successful. Or, if they’re unwilling to learn new things, once again, they’re not going to be successful.

2. Predictors of Sales Success – Resilience

Number two is resilience. If you want to read more about this, I highly recommend Angela Duckworth’s book by that name. What she described in her research, she found that there was a very strong correlation between those who were willing to stick at something even when it got really difficult. Talent counts once, but hard work counts twice, according to her.

So what you want to look for in a sales person is someone who is willing to bounce back from failures. Rejections don’t bother them that much. Failures are just a part of the learning process. This is the way that they think. Look for people who are highly resilient, who are willing to make mistakes and learn from them. This will be a very strong predictor of their sales success.

3. Predictors of Sales Success – Optimism

Number three is the positive mindset or optimism. There was a large experiment done many years ago by this psychologist named Martin Seligman. He worked with a life insurance company that was seeing a huge turnover in their staff. It was costing them millions and millions of dollars every year just in recruitment costs, let alone the poor performance that their sales people were having.

So as a result, they changed the hiring criteria from looking at traditional IQ scores, their past experience, or their scores in university or high school. They replaced it with just measures on optimism.

What they found was after a whole year of these two groups comparing to each other, they found that the optimistic group performed as much as 30% better than the ones that were hired with using the traditional criteria! So from that point on, the insurance company only used optimism as their hiring criteria, irrespective of their background.

Predictors of Sales Success – Conclusion

So there you have it, there’s the growth mindset, there’s resilience and optimism. So get to work on these. What do you think what other factors contribute towards sales success? I’d be interested in your comments below. Don’t forget to like and subscribe, and remember that integrity plus skills equals success.

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