Sales teams should codify what good looks like in their own organization, not copy trending advice.
Define good for your organization, not the industryBest practice is everywhere; what is missing is what good looks like here, for this team, with these customers.
Top performers run on hours, not instinctBob's relationships are a hundred thousand hours of decisions he has never been asked to explain, so the right questions have to pull them out.
Copy the process, let people choose their methodsEmily does not need Bob's golf membership, she needs her own way to earn the conversations golf was earning him.
Executive SummaryAI
Jeff Bajorek argues that best practice is widely available, but almost no company does the work of defining what good looks like inside its own organization, which is why copying a book or a trending post rarely produces results 90 days later.
He points out that on a team of 10 or 12 people, three veterans usually carry around 40% of the revenue on what they call instinct, which is really a hundred thousand hours of accumulated experience they have never had to explain.
The leader's job is to sit Bob down, ask what makes you different, what does that really mean, give me an example, and then extract, codify, document and modernize those answers so a newer rep like Emily can use them.
Bajorek separates methods, the art of selling, from process, the science: if Bob wins by playing golf at exclusive clubs and Emily has never held a club, she keeps the process of earning conversations and chooses her own method, exactly as he did in medical device sales once golf and steak dinners were banned.
He closes with four benefits to sell the exercise internally: faster onboarding from 12 months to six or three, less revenue at risk when a $3 million book walks, a 1% price line worth $200,000 a year on a $20 million company, and a team that believes what it does works.
Key Quote
“The phone is dead. It has been dead actually for quite some time and people keep claiming it dead.”
— Jeff Bajorek
Key Quote
“Maybe the math on that doesn't work. It's a lot of hours. It's enough that I quit counting.”
— Jeff Bajorek
Key Quote
“You have to get vulnerable yourself so that they are willing to get vulnerable with you.”