This is my note from the prior post:

NOTE: Competitiveness is not aggressive behavior towards human beings. It contains an element of sportsmanship and fair play. It doesn’t mean that we are not obligated to create win-win agreements with our prospects and clients . . . it means we compete for the right to create those win-win agreements.

There is nothing dishonest or unethical about competing to win. Period! I don’t accept that they are mutually exclusive.

I disagree with this whole idea that a salesperson is mainly competing against themselves. But, I’ll have more to say about that later.

It’s called fraud.

Sales, and the competitive drive needed to be successful in it, has become synonymous with fraud in the eyes of too many people. The reality is quite different. Those of us who have spent years training sales professionals know the truth. It is hard enough to get sales people to sell what they do believe in, much less something they don’t.

As for how they treat the competition, I have found that many of those who use unethical approaches do so out of ignorance. The are ignorant of more effective and appropriate approaches. Here I blame their management and a few in our industry who promote such behavior. Truly competitive people want to win and will use the approach that works most often. Fortunately for us, that is the high road.

To be top performers, sales people need to be fiercely competitive, they can’t let any obstacle stand in their way, and should be impatient with losing.

Being fiercely competitive is different from focusing on your competition. High performers are always aware of their competition, their strategies, positioning, and approaches to the market and customer. The best sales people I know, always know, by name, their competitors, have profiles of them and know how they sell, incorporating this knowledge into their sales strategies.

Part of being fiercely competitive is setting high personal standards of performance, high personal goals, and being driven to win. Beating the competition is something they do on the way to winning. Overachieving their quota is something they do on the way to reaching their own personal goals.

Thanks for keeping the discussion going! It’s really great to explore these issues.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by iannarino: Suceed in B2B Sales: Three Thoughts on Competitiveness in Salespeople: For more on increasing your… http://bit.ly/aQVwXD #sales #salestip…

Yesterday’s post on competitiveness in salespeople brought three comments, all of which require more than a response in the comments section under the original post. Ponder these thoughtful comments. Then act accordingly and fight like Hell….