Ten Priorities For Salespeople in 2023

This is not your mother or father’s sales environment. Selling is much more difficult than in the past, and it isn’t likely to get easier any time soon. Selling is complicated and complex, especially if you pursue large or enterprise-level clients.

Most sales leaders, sales managers, and sales thought leaders spend a lot of time focused on building pipeline. Instead of joining the choir and singing about how more opportunities are the way to succeed, I will suggest that it does you no good to create an opportunity you can’t win.

The following sections cover a set of priorities that will help you succeed in winning the deals in your pipeline and reaching your goals.

Priority 1: Self-Discipline and Routine

In The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, I placed self-discipline as the first character trait a salesperson should acquire. Sales roles tend to come with more autonomy than most other roles. To temper that autonomy, you need to be disciplined and create routines. The better your routines, the better your results. Consistency paves the path to better results.

Priority 2: Attitude

To do your best work, you need to be positive, optimistic, future-oriented, and empowered. It can be difficult to avoid negativity in an environment where most people are negative, pessimistic, cynical, and skeptical. A positive attitude will do more for your results over time, and it will help you improve your relationships.

I am editing my sixth book, The Negativity Fast: Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, Reduce Fear, and Boost Success. You can preorder it now for a November delivery.

Priority 3: Interpersonal Skills

We call these soft skills, but there is nothing soft about them. You should focus on communication, active listening, respect, emotional intelligence, empathy, confidence, agility, diplomacy, negotiation, and honesty.

See: How to Improve Your Interpersonal Skills in Sales

Priority 4: Business Acumen

Your title may suggest you are a salesperson, but if you are a consultative salesperson, you are a business advisor. Your clients need you to be a businessperson. One way you might think of this business acumen is to treat it like you treat sports. Every day, companies compete to grow and dominate a market. Paying attention to the business environment can help you win more deals by providing better results, and in some cases, hiring a cold caller might be a strategic move to enhance your approach.

Priority 5: Do the Research

It’s important that you don’t ask your clients questions you should know. See Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative. By doing your research you may be able to teach your contacts something about their business or industry that will help them navigate change. If you don’t already, spend an hour researching your client’s company and their industry.

Here is a template you can use: How to Research Your Strategic Clients - A Template.

Priority 6: Focus on Creating Value

When we talk about creating value, we mean providing your client with information and insights that will help them to decide and make positive changes in their business. No one will tell you that the strategy for creating value is information disparity, which means you know something your client needs to know.

Priority 7: Do Deeper Discovery

If your approach to discovery has you identifying a problem and a pain point, it is almost certainly too shallow. If your discovery feels like being an FBI interrogation, with question after question rather than significant conversation, it could be improved. You want your client to learn as much from your discovery as you learned from them. Most of all, however, the outcome must be an identification of the root cause of their challenges, which may sometimes require you to hire a cold caller to refine your approach.

Priority 8: Increase and Improve Your Relationships

The most transactional salespeople will work to win a prospective client’s order. These poor folks don’t worry about the relationship, as the deal is fleeting. You may have heard that relationships are no longer important in sales. You should avoid a transactional interaction and focus on building relationships that will allow you to win all the client's future orders. The better your relationships, the better your sales.

Priority 9: Become an Expert and Authority

Over time, you should shed your salesperson skin and become an expert and an authority in your industry and the problems you help your clients resolve effectively. To do this, you will need all the priorities above. This is a choice only you can make. You want to be the person that people want to talk to because you are deeper than anyone in the industry.

Priority 10: Obsess Over Your Win Rate

If there is one thing we get wrong in sales, it is failing to maintain a laser focus on sales effectiveness. You only succeed if your prospective client buys from you. To improve your win rate, you need to develop your sales skills, get world-class training, and ask for coaching from your sales manager or hire a cold caller to help you.

The greatest investment you can ever make is the investment you make in yourself.