Sales Strategies: What Top Producers Understand

You want to be a top producer, but you're stuck being average. You do what you're supposed to do according to the industry experts yet it isn't working. You’re frustrated and exhausted and you don’t know what you don’t know.

You’re not alone, and if you keep doing what you’ve been doing you’ll stay stuck and frustrated. The thing about success is that it can actually be the very thing that stifles future growth. The very things it took to get you to the level of success you enjoy today will keep you trapped at that level.

You aren’t where you want to be, but you’re comfortable enough to have grown complacent. That puts you smack dab in the danger zone. You don’t know what you don’t know, and you aren’t aggressively seeking the knowledge and skills you need to take you to the next level.

Top producers understand that if you aren’t moving forward you’re moving backward. Once you start that backward slide it’s ten times harder to regain momentum than it is to keep momentum going. You may be surprised to learn that top producers spend a great deal of time focusing on improving the fundamentals of sales and marketing.

You may be even more surprised to learn that top producers don’t do the things that industry experts tell them to do, and they don’t do those things for very good reason. The best of the best don’t cold call either face-to-face or via the phone, that don’t use canned marketing communications, and they never waste their time networking where the scavengers network. They didn’t become the best of the best because anyone handed them any breaks. They got there by learning from people outside their industry.

Why would they turn to people outside their industry for help when they could tap into the top producers in their industry? If you think about it for more than a few seconds the answers become obvious: the best doers aren’t necessarily the best coaches and mentors, the best aren’t likely to want to share their secrets and have you directly competing with them, and even if you tried to clone them it wouldn’t necessarily work for you because you aren’t the same people.

You’ll never reach the top if you try to be a copy cat version of someone else. Yes, there are sales systems you need to understand and follow. But the whole purpose of a sales system is to keep you focused on the prospect so you can help them to buy.

And that brings me to perhaps the most important thing a top producer understands. A top producer understands that if you want to sell you have to stop selling, and learn how to help people buy. It takes work on the upfront to learn how to do that, but top producers are never afraid to work on things that have a high pay-off rather than spinning their wheels on a bunch of activities that produce nothing. And isn’t that what you’re doing now?