What qualities define performance?

7th April 2015 |   Journal Of Sales Transformation

Verbal acuity, an achievement-oriented personality, the ability to display situational dominance and inward pessimism are the key attributes of high-performing salespeople compared with their less-successful counterparts, according to a specialist in “sales linguistics”.

Writing in Harvard Business Review on 18 March, Steve W Martin asked the question: “What separates high-performing salespeople who exceed their quota from underperformers who miss their quotas by more than 25%?” Los Angeles-based Martin, who is best known as the exponent of the “Heavy Hitter” sales philosophy, recently conducted a research project involving nearly 800 salespeople and sales leaders to better answer this question.

Steve W Martin teaches sales strategy at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. You can read the full HBR article here: https://hbr.org/2015/03/what-separates-the-strongest-salespeople-from-the-weakest