How many books have you read? How many podcasts have you listened to, or how many workshops have you done all in the hopes that you'll learn the secret sauce to becoming a top salesperson?

As sales professionals, what does it take to master your craft, and as sales managers and leaders, what do you train and coach your people on so that they can adapt to new systems and processes in this hyper, fast world we live in?

To master your craft, and to develop top performers, we have to constantly be working on the fundamentals. But what are those fundamentals? It's something that the sales community still can't agree on. For how long now has report after report come back to tell us that barely 50% of salespeople are making their quota? Despite the technology and training that we're spending every year, the results still haven't changed.

Why haven't things changed?

Maybe it's because we're still chasing after the next shiny toy, or technique, or tool. We get so easily obsessed with that, thinking that this is surely the thing that'll move the needle, easy.

It's kind of like if you were to plant a garden in the desert and ignore the soil and hope that someday you're going to get tomatoes from it. Sales fundamentals are a lot like dirt. Without strong dirt, nothing's going to grow. Fundamentals are the predictor of your sales improvement and abilities. The better the dirt, the better the fruit. And as sales professionals, our dirt are things like not needing approval from our buyers, the ability to control our emotions and have supportive beliefs that are supporting our execution, not hindering it. It's about the way we make decisions ourselves, our own comfort discussing money, and of course the ability to handle rejection.

But what about things like listening and asking questions?

You can't be successful in sales today without that. True, you can't, just like you can't have a garden without plants. But what gets you those plants? The dirt. What gets you to listen better? Controlling your emotion. What gets you to ask better and tougher questions? Getting over what others think of you.

Now, it's time that we start thinking about the person in salesperson and realize that if we don't address the cause of the behavior, we can't expect that behavior to change. This is what we're covering in our sales lab training course, which is how to master what happens between our ears, while learning the skills that we need to overcome our biggest sales blocks.

What kind of harvest will you have at the end of the year?

Will it be skinny with very little fruit, or full of life and abundance? Join me. Check out the links below for our next sales lab course to address the dirt that's happening.