What does it mean to be driven? To have drive? Is it important to sales success? Where does it come from? Can it be taught? One of the hardest challenges as a sales manager is hiring great talent. Even after multiple interviews, sales evaluation exams, and impeccable references contacted a less than hire can still happen. What makes them less than? I can sum this up in one word, Drive.
For most of my career I have been involved in technical product sales. This is an ever changing market with some serious training challenges. Train a sales staff on a product today to only have that product change drastically next month and your efforts negated. This is one of the reasons why I believe that true sales success can never be based on product knowledge alone.
You’ve probably been in the same demonstrations I have where the presenter shows product after product with no apparent goal or target. Sometimes these presentations even get disguised as a “design session”. It’s like they’re telling themselves “If I throw enough information their way they’ll buy something, anything!” A better approach is needed… a simple holistic approach.
I had passed out the sales playbook and gave my sales team some basic instructions with a completion date. So far so good. Yeah… not really.