12/19/2024-Week 50: 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.

You know about your ’24 revenue performance for the year, but what about your skill performance?

Can you tie your growth against objection handling this year 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 ’24 skill performance appraisal today by matching your skill growth to a few key accounts. (SO much fun!)

Here goes…list the top three accounts that rung your ’24 cash register in column A of a spreadsheet. In column B, list all of the essential selling skills you used to pop those accounts.

Associating specific skills with account wins will make you feel smart and strategic…and it’ll remind you that skills are the drivers of your goals.

When you’re done high-fiving yourself, list the skills you need to work on in ’25.

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.

Some dude named Hugo took a picture of himself every day from the time he was 12 until he got married. Watching Hugo’s physical transformation during this 3-minute video is fun and mesmerizing.

So…what would it look like to watch your skills progress and grow over time?

While it would be impossible to document that, at least you can think about it incrementally: what do you want your objection-handling skills to look like on 12.19.25? What about your value prop skills?