When we talk about what makes up great salespeople, great selling, great sales skills,

most of us kind of just come up with cliches, hardworking, people person, relationship-oriented,

solution, persuasive, all of these elements, and they're all good, the good ingredients. But today we're

going to be talking about the real key to pretty much any performance-based profession.

Now, when I say performance-based, the word performance may not be the right one, but it's the

closest I've come to.

When I say performance, what I mean is it's how well you do it, and in sales, it's how well

you do it in the eyes of the client, the prospect.

That's really all that matters. It's there. They're the audience.

They're the receivers of our communication. And all communication is performance. Written,

oral, visual, it's all a performance. It's how well you do it. Not just the words, the tonality, the inflection,

the timing. It's this whole sequence of things, and that can seem overwhelming at the

beginning, but that doesn't change it. We still have to do it. Today's metaphor will be martial arts. I've got a

sales rep turned sales manager with a great history in martial arts. And the metaphor of martial arts

is the repetitions, the practice, the feedback, and more repetit. That cycle, that learning cycle

that we all go through. Now, where does this fall down in sales? In sales, we don't really get,

we get the reps, but we don't get the feedback and the accurate feedback and the consistent feedback because

the people on the other end are so different. Our manager may not really be up on what does

work today or the difference between good and great and we end up floundering,

not knowing, is it what we're doing,

is it what we're doing it with,

is it the company that we're at,

...