One of the greatest thrills of a top-performing salesperson comes from hitting their sales goal. Not just once, but consistently. So when you, as a leader, habitually put the targets out of the reach of even your best performers, it’s like shooting yourself in the foot and them in the heart.
Stretch goals are fine. Stretch goals are healthy. But there is a big difference between a stretch goal that offers a tantalizing challenge for your sales team and one that sucks the very life out of them.

The first and most costly part of unrealistic goal setting is silent non-compliance. Your best salespeople will just “check out” and the worst part is you won’t event know it. They’ll put on a rah-rah face and go through the motions, but inside their own heads they know full well there is no way that goal is getting met.
I would like to come right out and say that goal setting for sales teams is a fine art. I’m glad I own my own company, though, because if I’d used the word “art” in relation to “sales” in my former life (flesh pressed into the sweaty ranks of a corporate sales scrum), I’d be staked out on the ground and gagged with the sales leader’s tube socks. I’ve never been much of an athlete but, having spent a career in sales, I’ve had a belly full of sports analogies. Arms locked; head down; throw your gut into it; never quit; never say die. Second place is the first loser and all that.

I know I’m going off on a tangent here but this is a big part of the problem – especially in the adult beverage industry – sales teams led by frustrated “athletes” with pseudo-macho swagger. I’ve got no problem with “leaving it all on the field,” but last time I looked, a P&L wasn’t printed on Astroturf. Ironically, “winning” with customers from a sales perspective has absolutely nothing to do with “drive” and “guts.” It’s about much softer skills like dependability and trust. When I look for great salespeople, I don’t look for the drive of an athlete, I look for the heart of a servant. I place a much higher value on promise-keeping than butt-kicking. No doubt there are plenty of former (and current) athletes that are excellent sales pros doing a great job year after year. My point is unrealistic sales goals are too often created because of the macho mindset so prevalent in our industry.

OK, back to the main point. The second most expensive cost of setting unrealistic goals is that it fosters a culture of failure. What normally happens when a salesperson continually misses their goals? That’s right: they either quit or get fired. Either way, it’s failure through and through. Now, for those who might say, “Good riddance,” keep in mind it’s impossible to keep great salespeople on the roster in an environment like this because culture is important to sales pros and, as I’ve said before, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Per my previous post about why sales incentives don’t work, great salespeople aren’t going to respond to your “carrot and stick” approach. Nothing will drive them away faster than goals that are too high because nobody likes to feel like a failure.

So, what am I saying? Create a soft, cushy environment? Give everyone a trophy? Of course not. This is business we’re talking about. A business has goals and they need to be met consistently. Just be smart about it. Be mindful of the cost of unrealistic goals. One way to tell if your goals are too high is to ask yourself how often your team achieves them. If everyone on the sales team is missing the goals, they are probably too high.

The last cost of unrealistic sales goals that I’ll cite is poor quality of distribution. In the pursuit of aggressive goals, salespeople and distributors will do things that are not in the best interest of the brand. For example, a common tactic is to write lucrative incentives for distributors to go out and gain new distribution. While this might look good on the surface, what you end up with in reality is placements at restaurants and retailers where the account buys just enough to qualify the distributor sales rep for the incentive –and no more. A very large percentage of those accounts never purchase your products again. This goes on every day of the week all over the country. Is the equity of your brand truly enhanced when you gain 50 new points of distribution but 45 of them never purchase your product again? These “one-and-done” sales come back to bite you because there’s no stickiness to them. Now, for those companies wise enough to invest in a CRM system that is embedded with RAD data, this can be monitored. Without CRM, however, you may not even know this is happening.

Setting goals that stretch an organization to full potential is a critical business imperative for any consumer product company – especially within the hyper-competitive wine, spirits and beer industries. Goals that are unrealistic and un-achievable, however, are not only counter-productive but very costly in terms of failing to keep salespeople engaged and the erosion of precious brand equity.

Conventional wisdom is a powerful thing but it is also frequently and horribly incorrect. As human beings, most of us are definitely motivated by rewards. But, when it comes to using sales incentives to “motivate” sales people, the misconceptions abound.

I’ve written before about the futility of trying to “motivate” salespeople. If a salesperson needs to be motivated, he/she shouldn’t be on your team. Period. End of story. If you can’t change your people, change your people. As my business hero, Marcus Lemonis, says, “People. Product. Process.” Businesses tend to spend way too much time on the Product part and not enough time on the People part. And when it comes to Sales People, it’s all too common to see them as interchangeable cogs in a machine that only requires a little grease now and again to make it move faster.

Great salespeople need no motivation outside of themselves to consistently perform at a high level. I speak from experience here. Some of the top performing salespeople I’ve led over the years had absolutely no idea where they stood in relation to their annual bonus attainment as the year drew to a close. Sure, they loved getting the bonus every year – in fact, they expected it. But, the way they got it was to work themselves into the ground and then wait and see what their bonus was. I kid you not. And guess what? Their bonus was always the largest among the team members.

Most great salespeople care about two things above all else: winning and pleasing their customers. It’s in their DNA. They jump out of bed every day and attack their jobs with gusto. They do it because that’s who they are and not because someone else is “driving” them. By the way, whenever I see a business plan that has the phrase, “drive sales by doing ____,” I want to throw up in my mouth. These plans are written by people who don’t have a clue how to achieve outstanding sales results year after year. But I digress. The very best sales people will walk through walls to please their customers (and they do it of their own accord). They will work long hours to keep their promises. And, yes, they expect to be rewarded for their efforts. The primary job of a sales leader, therefore, is to find and keep these people – not to create clever ways to motivate them.

Let me pause to clarify something. I am not saying you should not offer sales incentives and bonuses to your top performers. Quite to the contrary. Just don’t go around thinking you can get an average or mediocre salesperson to improve their performance because you hold out some juicy carrot.

So what can you do? There are far better ways to accelerate your sales results. Assuming you have great sales people to start with, ask yourself (and maybe a few sales team members) some of these questions below. A word of caution here – if you’re not 100% committed to solving the deficiencies you uncover, don’t even go down this path. You’ll end up doing more harm than good by giving your sales team false hope.

1) Does your sales team have the tools and resources to do their job well?
2) Are you making it easier or harder for them to keep their promises to their customers?
3) Do they have realistic sales goals?
4) Do the goal posts keep moving?
5) Are the rewards for keeping and maintaining your best customers commensurate with acquiring new customers?
6) Do you routinely provide recognition of top performers among their peers – especially at company-wide gatherings?

Some of the things on this list cost very little, and those that do cost money offer a much higher return on investment than offering more “incentives” to your sales people.
Lastly, please consider the wisdom offered in this great Ted Talk by Daniel Pink called “The Puzzle of Motivation.” It’s a good place to start if you’re ready to start seeing sales incentives in a whole new light.

I’m not sure who would actually want to demoralize their sales team, but I’m sorry to say it happens every day of the week. I mean, everyone wants their sales team to consistently perform at a high level, right? But, like many things in business, good intentions don’t always translate to best results. Conventional wisdom, after all, is often wrong.

There’s an old joke about a man who goes to the doctor complaining that every time he drinks coffee he gets a sharp pain in his right eye. The doctor’s sage advice? “Try taking the spoon out of the cup.” These 3 ways of demoralizing your sales team are those “spoons in the cup” and if you’re not happy with the current level of production from your sales team, you just might be in the mood for my nickel’s worth of free advice.

1. Measure activity instead of results
I know countless sales leaders and business owners who sincerely believe more sales calls will result in more sales. In theory it seems logical, but in reality nothing could be further from the truth. Unless you’re in telemarketing, you’re wasting valuable time on a very low-probability activity.

In order to embrace the more-equals-more approach, you’d have to accept certain assumptions. One of those assumptions is that buyers are always ready to buy the minute they pick up the phone. Or that it only takes one great sales presentation to close a sale. The truth is, it can take up to 10 or 11 “touches” until a buyer signs the order. Another supposition is that a prospect is a prospect is a prospect. If they are not buying from us now, they are fair game. The truth is that not all accounts are equal. Not even close. The name of the game here is quality, not quantity.

I’d rather see a salesperson spend 40-50% of his time researching and qualifying the most promising prospects before ever picking up the phone. There is a direct correlation between high closing ratios and a solid qualification process. Whatever you measure, you get more of. If you want more sales calls, please keep measuring them – just know that as you do, you’re sucking the life out of your sales team. Now if you want more sales, measure only the results.

2. Tell them HOW to do their job
“Just give me my sales goals and leave me alone” is a common but unspoken sentiment among most salespeople. The world is full of sales leaders who believe their job is to ride roughshod over their salespeople who, without your constant supervision, would spend all day sharpening pencils and rearranging their desk. If you are worried about this behavior, the problem is YOU, because you’ve done a poor hiring job.

Micromanagers are a curse to any sales team. They slow things down. They create fear and loathing. It would save everyone a lot of time if they just came out and said, “I think you’re incompetent.” Every unsolicited suggestion, every “constructive” critique chips away at a salesperson’s self-esteem. Creativity and the ability to think fast on your feet are key components to sales success. So if you don’t care about sales success, by all means, get your people to question themselves and to think they need to stop and ask your permission before proceeding.

3. Show you don’t trust them
In Stephen M. R. Covey’s book, The Speed of Trust, he calls trust a “critical performance multiplier.” The ability of a salesperson to perform at a very high level is in direct proportion the level of trust given to them by their supervisor. Everyone knows what it feels like to not be trusted by your boss. You can just feel it. One way this shows up in a sales job is your boss calling you at the end of the work day on the pretense of “seeing how your day went” and instead listening as hard as he can for background noises that might indicate your presence in a bar, or far worse – at home playing with your children. And, of course, their favorite day of the week to do this is Friday.

The whole “weekly/daily” call report is also a great way to show your people you don’t trust them. Look, you’re either hitting your sales goals or you’re not. If you don’t think your sales people are capable of achieving their sales goals or can’t be trusted to conduct themselves at work with honor, you should fire them on the spot. No amount of babysitting or micro-managing is going ameliorate a lack of integrity.

A final note addressed to Presidents and CEO’s: if you are not happy with your company’s sales results, don’t be too quick to blame your sales people. Take a good, hard look at the sales leaders, too. More often than not, salespeople are being held back from their potential by their leaders. After all, it’s quite true that people don’t quit companies, they quit their managers.

I know of no more challenging aspect of being a sales leader than making good hiring decisions. Leading sales pros requires very different proficiencies than just being a top sales performer in your own right. One of those skills is the ability to assess talent.

Before you can be great at something, you have to be good at it. Before you can be good at it, you have to be bad at it. And before you can be bad at it, you have to try. This pretty much sums up my experience in the hiring-manager dimension of my career. I became very good at finding, evaluating, and hiring outstanding salespeople only because I used to be so horribly inept at it. Experience is the best teacher.

Fortunately, I’ve had several mentors who’ve imparted their wisdom to me. This blog post is about paying that wisdom forward to you. My greatest boss, teacher, coach and mentor, Glenn Yaffa, was the Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Ste. Michelle Wine Estates until his retirement. Glenn taught me to ask myself three questions as I considered a candidate for a sales role on my team.

1) Can they do the job?
Yes, skills and experience are important. However, the bigger idea here is “Can they execute? Can they deliver results?” Being effective in a sales role requires the aptitude to get the job done year after year without excuse. Certain challenges will always be present like unplanned price changes, inventory shortages, inconsistent quality, gaps in the portfolio, and competitive pressures. Even so, when you reach the end of the fiscal year, will this person offer up every excuse in the book to justify their failure or will they exceed all expectations because that’s who they are?

Don’t hire “Talkers.” Only hire “Doers.” Let me illustrate. I recently had a coaching session with a salesperson employed by one of my consulting clients who, for three consecutive years, had fallen well short of expectations. I asked him to make a list of the things keeping him from reaching his sales goals. As we stepped back to look at his lengthy catalog of “obstacles,” I pointed out that not one single item was within his control. His mindset, in essence, was, “It’s not my fault.” This is exactly the type of person you do not want to hire. Without further intervention, this guy would always be categorized as a “Talker,” not a “Doer.”

Contrast this with some of the stars on my former sales teams. These rainmakers saw the world from a completely different perspective. Their attitude was, “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me” and “My job is to ‘find a way’ no matter.” What a contrast! There are people out there whose internal “will to win” far exceeds any external expectations. They are worth their weight in gold because they know how to execute. They take full responsibility for outcomes and never make excuses. Job number one for a sales leader is to fill your team with “Doers.” No amount of training, incentives, or threats can fix a “Talker.” You must learn how to discover the difference as you evaluate your candidate pool.

2) Will they do the job?
What you want to find are people who are hard working, self-starters, and able to operate with little to no supervision. The idea that you have to motivate salespeople is a fatal mistake. Find people who want to succeed because that’s how they roll, not because someone is compelling them to do so. To discover if a candidate WILL do the job, ask lots of questions about their achievements to date. Ask them, “To what do you attribute your success?” Get them talking about how they overcame obstacles to get the job done. What you are looking for here is the will to win, and asking lots of questions about how they have functioned in previous situations is the best way to discover it.

3) Are they a great fit?
Never underestimate the importance of “fit.” Sales leaders are the keepers of the culture and, as one of my business heroes likes to say, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast!” The key to establishing and curating a solid sales culture is being clear with yourself and the team about the values and guiding principles that define who you are as a group. A great example of a winning team culture is the “work hard, play hard” mindset. Another one is “we like to win.” Do team members like each other? Do they respect one another? Do they value excellence? Are they committed to continuous self-improvement? Bringing a new salesperson into an existing high-performance team is risky business and an important responsibility of the team leader. Salespeople like to look around at the other members of the team and see similar values. Contrary to popular belief, selling is a team sport; there’s no place for lone wolves. You owe it to your stars to bring in other stars and nothing less. We’re not talking about everyone being exactly the same. On the contrary, there should be an array of diversity among team members so they can draw upon each other’s strengths.

Like so many aspects of the business world, practice makes perfect. Building a sales team that consistently delivers outstanding results starts with the hiring process. Take your time. Be patient. Don’t allow the pressure to fill an open role cause you to rush the process. Be diligent, ruthless, and thorough in judging the capabilities of prospects. Don’t rely too heavily on résumés and interviews. Above all, trust your gut. A good rule of thumb in avoiding hiring mistakes is, “When in doubt, don’t.” If you have any reticence about moving forward with a new sales person, that’s your gut trying to keep you from making a big mistake.

No big deal

Having lead dozens of salespeople and read thousands of sales call reports over the years, I have developed a highly receptive “BS detector.” Effective salespeople typically have winning personalities, which can be a double-edged sword. They have that perfect combination of being great listeners and smooth talkers with a highly persuasive way of interacting with other people. I’m not talking here about smarmy hucksters, but rather people who truly have a gift. An adept salesperson is often a very caring person. They can engage in small talk with ease and they make other people feel important. However, these same talents and tendencies often have a negative side. When things start to lean towards hyperbole and – in the worst cases – fabrication, you could be dealing with a completely different animal.

One of the jobs of a sales leader is to coach and teach people how to reign in some of these “gifts” and show a little restraint. It’s gratifying to see how time and maturity have a way of softening the edges and refining the nuances of dedicated salespeople. Exuberance is moderated with experience. The innate talent for moving others is raised to a high art.

But how can you tell if your salespeople are just plain full of it? Let me save you some time and trouble by providing you with five telltale signs you’re being taken for a ride.

1. Complaining about all the hard work.
Whenever I hear a salesperson blather on about how much work they have to do or how many hours they’re putting in, a big red flag goes off in my brain. Being a salesperson IS hard work. The profession is characterized by hard work and long hours. If you feel the need to tell me about it, you are most likely not doing it. This is a classic sign that a salesperson wants me to think they’re working hard. I’ve had the pleasure of leading some remarkable and highly successful people over the years and not one of them ever complained about how much they were working.

2. Making excuses.
You’d think this would be a little easier to spot but it can be very subtle so you must pay close attention. Excuses come in all shapes and sizes, but they all add up to the same thing: failure to take responsibility for your own outcomes. These people always have a convenient explanation for why something didn’t get done or some deadline didn’t get met. If you want to be a distinguished sales leader, accept results only – never excuses. Something either did or did not get done. No explanation needed. No explanation expected. I don’t need to hear why. Just come right out and say it. “I didn’t do it and I have no excuse.” Now, doesn’t that feel better? This can be used in all aspects of life, not just the profession of selling.

3. A vocabulary of empty buzz words.
Listen closely to the language of your salespeople. Do they have go-to phrases championing their supposed productivity? Such mendacities include “pushing for,” “trying to,” “waiting for,” and – my favorite – “working on.” Then, of course, there’s the granddaddy of them all: “hoping for.” For crying out loud, there’s a whole book written on this one! It’s called Hope is Not A Strategy. It’s your job as a sales leader to eradicate this baloney. What we want to see are words and phrases like, “met with,” “received an order commitment from,” and “closed the deal with.” Anything other than that is just fluff.

4. Lengthy call reports.
I’m really not a fan at all of sales call reports. Results talk; BS walks. “Are you on track to meet your sales goals?” That’s all I need to know. If you must have call reports, better to have a short & sweet but veracious one than the War and Peace of claptrap. As Shakespeare would have said, “Me thinks thou doth spew forth too much.” One of the most reliable signs you’ve got a slacker on the payroll is the flowery and empty chatter of a lengthy call report. Teach your reps to include only the most relevant info. Salespeople who aren’t’ working very much love to tell you how much they are and the call report is their favorite vehicle with which to do it.

5. They never seem to have enough time.
In his must-read book, The Four Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris said it best: “Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant.” Wow, it’s hard to add anything to that! No one has any less time or more time than anyone else. Don’t use lack of time as an excuse for not getting things done. The profession of sales is one of the highest paid jobs around. According to US News, the average salesperson earns $65k per year. From my own experience, I know the very best make well into six figures as a base salary with bonuses as high as 25-30%. If you are being paid this kind of money, there’s only one thing your company wants in return: profitable results. Learn to manage your time well and prioritize. Narrow the focus of your activity on only the most important things.

All of this comes back to hiring the right people to begin with. Outstanding sales teams are built one person at a time. Get some training for yourself. Learn to be very good at assessing talent. Rely heavily on your HR team because this is their area of expertise. Beware the trap of falling in love with the job candidate in the interview. These same people who charm you from across the desk could easily be your worst nightmare. Don’t rely too heavily on resumes or even the interview itself. If there’s any truth to the adage that the person you interview is not the same person who comes to work for you, it is especially true of salespeople.

I didn’t set out to have a career in sales. Like many people, I just happened into it. But I stayed with it for thirty years. And for just over half of those years, I was a leader and coach of salespeople which, for anyone who’s done it knows, is an entirely different ball of wax and requires a completely different set of skills than being an individual performer.

Just as in any other line of work, there are varying degrees of proficiency in the field. You’ll find a wide assortment of great salespeople, horrible salespeople and everything in between. Unfortunately, the general stereotype of a salesperson is not a positive one, which is a shame because the vast majority of people who make a living in sales are darn good at what they do. It’s not fair to them that all salespeople are lumped in with the hacks of our profession. I feel especially bad for great used car salespeople (and I’ve met many) because the bad ones ruin it for everyone else.

So, what separates good salespeople from bad salespeople? Another question is do bad salespeople even know they are bad? I’d say a big part of the reason salespeople get such a terrible rap is because their own companies have trained them to do the wrong things (if they bother to train them at all). They simply don’t know any better. It’s like when I get bad service in a restaurant. I don’t blame the server. I blame the management.

I’m reminded of what really bad salesmanship looks like whenever I walk into my neighborhood big-box home improvement store and I’m welcomed with the universally loathed greeting, “Can I help you find anything?” Not only are these unofficial greeters NOT store employees but they are the world’s worst salespeople. It’s the classic bait and switch. Drape a standard-issue apron on your chest, masquerade as a store employee and attempt to “hard sell” any hapless fool who walks through the door on the features and benefits of your windows (or attic insulation or whatever super-high margin product is being pushed that day). Wait- you mean you weren’t really serious when you offered to help me find something? Of course you weren’t. Hack.

But I digress. This post is supposed to be about what makes a great salesperson so extraordinary. I will, therefore, happily focus the rest of this space on the eight traits, I have found, to be universal among the very best salespeople. A quick side note: As many championship teams have proven time and again, you don’t have to be a great basketball player to be a great basketball coach. I take no small comfort in this truth because I was never a very good salesperson myself – maybe just slightly above average. But as a long time coach of salespeople, I’ve learned to spot a great one when I see one and understand entirely what makes them so special.

So, without further ado, here is my list of eight traits of the greats:

They are supremely dependable.

Great salespeople keep their commitments. Period. They always do what they say they’re going to do. Always. Whenever buyers are given the opportunity to rate, rank or otherwise recognize their best vendors, this quality of “dependability” is universally at the top of their list. I mean, look at it from a buyers’ perspective. Most salespeople over promise and under deliver. In response, buyers tend to steer the bulk of their business to the most dependable, trustworthy salespeople. It’s not rocket science, but it is oh so hard to find people like this!

They are hard working, self starters

I always chuckle (audibly) when I hear sales managers ask how to “motivate” their sales people. Here’s a nickel’s worth of free advice: don’t worry about how to motivate the members of your sales team. All great salespeople hold themselves to a much higher standard than you could ever dream up for them. Hire people who are self–motivated and then get the hell out of their way. Want something to do? Look for ways to make their paths as smooth as possible.

They excel at building and maintaining relationships

We’re talking, here, about genuine relationships. Not the highly manufactured “hi-how-can-I-help-you?” nonsense you get from the apron-clad store greeters. Great salespeople truly do care about people in general and their customers specifically. You can tell because they are also great listeners. When I’m on this topic, I always think about a one particular person on my team (who, eventually, succeeded me as the leader). When Lou (his real name) talks to you, he gives you his total and complete attention. He looks you right in the eye and makes a deep, sincere connection. When you talk to him, you feel like you are the most important person on the planet. You feel like he really cares because – guess what? – He DOES.

They keep good records and are very organized

Great sales people take a lot of notes. In order to deliver on the first point above (being dependable), they know they can’t trust anything to their memory. Whenever I hire someone for a sales role, I do my best to test and probe to find out what their organizational skills are like. I know, from experience, that being a salesperson is a very tough job with a lot of details to track. Only a super-organized person can perform well in the role. To be fair, there are certainly lots of great salespeople who are not very organized but they are no picnic to manage. Go for the organized ones if you can.

They are very disciplined in the use of their time.

Here’s where we really start to separate the wheat from the chaff. Bad salespeople are notoriously “all over the place.” They tend to measure success in terms of hours worked, number of sales calls made, and the size of their to-do list. In fact, you’ll know you’ve got a “dud” on your hands if they’re always complaining about how hard they are working. Great salespeople have a lot to do too, but you won’t hear them complaining about it. The salespeople who get the most done are very stingy with the use of their time and allocate it in a way that will provide them (and their company) with maximum return. They never confuse activity with achievement. They want to be measured by results, not methods. They are the measure-twice, cut-once types (credit to another former team member, Colleen B for this gem). To great salespeople, time IS money and they are thrifty stewards of it. And, lastly, they know when & how to say, “no.”

They are highly coachable

You can always tell a bad salesperson because they already know it all, their sales manager is a moron, and they’re always talking way more than they’re listening. Truly great salespeople, however, are intellectually curious. They are always looking for a better, faster way. Humility in a person is such an attractive trait not because it makes them a more pleasant person to be around (which it most certainly does) but because it puts them in a constant state of readiness and openness to new ideas. The good news for sales leaders is this one is very easy to ferret out during the interview. Just get the candidate talking about themselves and their accomplishments. If you can’t get a word in edgewise, then cut the interview short and move on.

They are great team players

Most people don’t consider sales a team sport. But it’s very rare to be a professional salesperson and not also be part of a sales team. Most companies have many salespeople grouped into teams of five or six with a common manager. Great salespeople not only enjoy being a part of a team but also thrive among like-minded peers. They feed off each other, support each other and, together, elevate the atmosphere as well as the performance. Great salespeople are very others-minded and look for ways to cheer on the group. Sales leaders carry a great responsibility to not let the locker room be poisoned by a non-team player. Like cancer, it will kill the team from the inside out. Do your best salespeople a favor and learn how to spot this trait during the interview process. It’s your job to keep these bad apples off the team.

They have a positive attitude

I probably could have listed this one first since it is so important. Glass-half-full people make better salespeople every single time. Positive people lift up everyone around them. Being a salesperson is a very tough job! You can’t survive, let alone thrive, without keeping a positive attitude. Great salespeople are also very supportive of both the team leader’s and the company’s policies. They don’t take things personally. They bounce back from failures and setbacks. They wake up every day just knowing it’s going to be a great day.

So that’s my list. Are there any other traits of greatness? Absolutely. And I’d be thrilled if you’d add some of your own thoughts and experiences to the comments section below so we can all benefit from your perspective. Or, feel free to email me at ben@salisburycreative.com

One final note to all the wonderful salespeople out there who are shining examples of how to do it right: keep up the great work!