12/19/2023-How Was Your Year?

"Manage your performance, not your results" is the simplest and most powerful sales mantra. Focus on your actions and behaviors, and the results will come. Skills drive your actions and behaviors.

Ready to appraise your skill performance in ’23? C’mon, it’ll be fun!

Your end-of-year commission deposit will taste better if you correlate skill activations and earnings.

Can you tie the advancements you made this past year with objection handling to your big win on the ACME account?

And what about asking probing and impact questions? Which account did those skills make a difference on?

Receiving commissions is always fun, but understanding how you were able to influence perceptions and impact decisions is better.

Conduct a fun ’23 skill performance appraisal today by matching skill growth to a few key accounts. (Fun?)

Here goes…list the top three accounts that rung your commission cash register in ’23 and write down their names in column A of a spreadsheet. In column B, list the key skills you used to pop those accounts.

List as many as you want, but push yourself to remember the specifics around how you activated the skills. Include a few germane notes that will make you feel good about your accomplishments and raise awareness for continuing to grow your skills.

Skills are the building blocks for success in sales. If skills don’t develop and grow, there won’t be a long string of big commission checks that come in year after year. Sellers who are constantly working on their skills are those who get the biggest checks. Full stop.

Unfortunately, most managers and companies today define performance solely by the revenue they produce. That’s unfortunate because that thinking ignores the foundations of exactly what drives the revenue: your consistent application of skills and best practice actions! Those are what create the commission events.

The TOP 10% understand that performance is built through skill development and professional evolution. In that light, don’t be afraid to look yourself in the mirror and appraise your performance…at any stage of your career. (Yes, do it even when you think you don’t need to do it anymore.)

Don’t appraise your year solely based on revenue production; add skill growth to your annual performance appraisal.

It’s easy to stack up the numbers and say, "…well, I was up 13% this quarter YOY, and last quarter I was up 8%." But a myopic perspective only on your revenue numbers will get you mixed up on what’s truly important…skills.

Have you ever seen those videos where the creator blends a selfie together over time to make a cool montage? This 3-minute version is one you’ll want to sit through because of the payoff at the end.

Hugo does an awesome job holding the same pose for over nine years but slows the photograph sequence toward the end to reveal him and his bride on their wedding day.

Hugo’s physical transformation is fun to watch, and it introduces an interesting question: what would it look like to watch your skills progress and grow over time?

Start simple: what do you want your core skills to look like this time next year?