Sales Rep vs. Sales Pro | SOS Ep. 378

We draw a hard line between a sales rep and a sales professional, and show how to run your territory like a business. Through real stories and simple systems, we map the habits that shrink dry spells, grow revenue, and put you in control of your career.

• defining the rep vs professional mindset
• treating your territory as a business
• action bias over excuses and waiting
• planning days, weeks, and months in advance
• choosing focused weekend or evening work intentionally
• service ethic and availability that earns trust
• examples from coaching clients Erica and Brendan
• preparing for layoffs and pivots with a live network
• managing pipeline from unaware to advocate
• reducing droughts with consistent prospecting

Schedule a call and reach out to me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a DM.

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing the Mission
• 0:38 Defining Sales Rep vs. Sales Pro
• 2:13 Ownership Mindset and Territory as Business
• 3:35 Action Bias vs. Excuses
• 6:20 Planning, Preparation, and Time Choices
• 8:40 Short-Term Sacrifice, Long-Term Gain
• 10:58 Professional Availability and Service Ethic
• 12:22 Client Spotlights: Erica and Brendan

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

The Surviving Outside Sales podcast, hosted by Mike O'Kelly, presented by Sales Builder Academy. The goal is to survive and thrive at all phases of outside sales, whether you're getting in, dominating, or getting out. Surviving Outside Sales. Now on with the show.

SPEAKER_01: 0:38

And I was chatting with a couple of business owners this week, and we were actually talking about uh salespeople. And we were talking about what makes a great salesperson, what makes a sales pro, and how few sales pros there actually are in the industry. And it feels like as the days, the months, the years go by, there are fewer and fewer and fewer. So today's topic is the difference between a sales rep and a sales professional. And if you have been listening to the podcast, you have heard me talk about this before. If you're one of my coaching uh students or clients, you know that I talk about this all the time. It is one of the biggest changes you can make in your sales career is elevate uh not only your mindset, but how you think about what you do and how it impacts the people around you. It's the difference between being an employee and being a professional. And those are not synonymous. Just because you have a job and you have a title and you have a role that a company is willing to pay you for does not make you a professional. Okay. To be a professional, you have to think like a business owner because you are. If you are in the outside sales world, you are a business owner, you have a territory. That territory is a small business within your company, and you have to act like it. You have to think as if. Too many times salespeople believe that they are sales professionals because they go out and they make sales calls and they close deals, what have you. But a difference between a sales rep and a sales uh professional, there are several big differences. Number one, a sales rep will also always sit back and wait for things to happen. A sales professional will always go out and make things happen on their own. They will take massive action. A sales rep will complain or make excuses as to why they can't be successful. A sales professional will overcome. I don't think in my entire sales career as a post-enterprise rent a car that I had a product or a service that most people had ever heard of. In fact, a lot of the products that I sold, I had to introduce them. They weren't brand new to the market, but I had to introduce them to at least 40 to 50 percent of my future clients, my future buyers. I had to introduce it because the previous reps did not do so. And I didn't always understand what it was to be a sales professional. I had great coaches, I had great mentors throughout the years. And it really is once you can identify what the makeup is, what the process is to be a sales professional, how to build those habits, create those systems within your business. It is amazing how much A, easier the job is, and B, how much more money you can make, how many more sales you can make. You know, a sales rep will wake up in the morning and say, What am I gonna do today? A sales professional already has their day, week, possibly their month planned out ahead. They have used their quote unquote free time to prepare. And if you fail to prepare, you better prepare to fail. A sales professional will not worry about work-life balance. Now, I'm not all for working nonstop. Okay. You need to have some breaks, you need to have some refresh time, you can't work all the time. Uh, what's the saying? All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy, or it's Jack a dull boy, but Mike a dull boy. It's true. You can't just work 24-7. You can't. However, I know a lot of salespeople, and they are sales reps, where if you ask them to do anything after hours, they refuse. If you ask them if they do anything on the weekends to prepare, they refuse. I don't need to do that. I have I want my weekends for free. Well, sometimes you have to do that. Okay, you're gonna get new information. You're gonna have to work on the weekends. Um, I want to give it, I'm gonna give a shout-out to one of my students right now. Um, she's halfway around the world, she's in Australia. Her name's Erica. And Erica is willing because of the time differences. A, she was willing to meet with me to do her coaching at 5 a.m. local time. And when that didn't work after several weeks, we decided to do Friday nights on the East Coast, Saturday mornings in Australia. Erica is a sales professional. She is going above and beyond to better her craft, and she's doing what she has to do because she realizes this is short-term pain, long-term gain. She's giving up an hour on her Saturday morning to better her profession, to better her skill set. I can't tell you how many people are not willing to do that. Uh, locally here in Charlotte, I've got a student named Brendan. Brendan was willing to meet me out for uh coffee late night from seven to nine and for us to work on various things because he doesn't have the time during the day. He really doesn't. He's like, I am just jammed. He's like, is there any way we could do like late after hours? I said, you know what? Let's just get together. We're both local here in Charlotte. Let's just meet up for a couple hours and let's knock out about three things that we had been working on. He was willing to do so. Now I am willing to do so. I am a professional. I will, I'm not one of those guys, you know. I see a lot of guys on LinkedIn. They're like, oh, you know, I'm I don't work on the weekends because I get my work done Monday through Friday. Oh, I'm I'm great. I'm grateful you can do that. Congratulations. Okay. But I'm here to serve other people. And other people need to work sometimes at night, and I'm here to help other people. And sometimes that means that I have to do a Friday night after my kids go down and be onto a Zoom until 10:30 on Friday night, East Coast time, because that's what my client needs. And that's the help that I'm willing to give. That is being a professional. And look, if you have some type of work, if you have some type of job, if you have a system, or if you are in some time, some line of work that affords you the opportunity to spend all weekend with your wife, your husband, your kids, where you can clock out at four o'clock on a Friday and you don't have to think about it again until Monday morning, fantastic. I applaud you. But denigrating other people who work on the weekends, I'll tell you this. I work on the weekends. And the reason why I work on the weekends is because I have a business that's open seven days a week. And so I do have to work on the weekends. I also, if I am working on my sales coaching business or my consulting business, guess what? If my kids are at home or my kids are with my wife, um, sometimes my kids are up here playing in my quote unquote office slash bonus room slash kids room. If my kids are up here, um, you know, they're usually playing with things. And I usually spend only, you know, two to two and a half because I have time in the day where I just can't get it done. Okay. So that's great. I have not been able to do that. Also, because of the nature of my businesses, I get 100% uninterruption on Saturdays. I don't have clients calling me, I don't have uh business partners calling me, I don't have my employees calling me, nobody's calling me on Saturdays, nobody's texting me. Monday through Friday, I can't tell you how many times that I have been recording a podcast episode. I've been on a client call and there's been a 911 from my business. There's been something I have to handle in real time. I don't get that on the weekends. I don't know why. Knock on wood. I hope it continues. My point is do not take your advice from other people. Okay, you have to figure out what you have to do because we have a limited amount of time in our sales career. We really do. We have to make hay today. We can't wait and just say, well, you know, I'll get it next year or I'll do, I'll get on the next job or the next role. We can't do that. Being a professional is understanding that you may not have tomorrow. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. You know, if sales professionals, whenever a layoff happens or a downsizing happens, or it's a time to move on, they're prepared. A sales rep is not prepared. A sales rep, unfortunately, you see those poor souls on LinkedIn just saying, oh my gosh, it's been six months and I haven't found a role. I do, I've been in situations like that early in my career. Once I took control of my career, and once I took control of where I was going, there's very, very little downtime whenever I need to look for another role, find another role, um, whenever I needed to pivot. There's very little downtime. And the reason why was because I understood the game of sales. And sales is a business. I understood that. Going back to you know, doing what you have to do, that's being a sales professional. Do what you have to do. Sales professionals are going to earn the business because they're willing to do what other people are not willing to do, not legally, ethically, and morally. Okay. I'm not telling you to break any code of conduct, break ethics, break the law, break rules. I'm not saying that. However, it is willing to do what other people aren't. And I can't even tell you how many times that I have interviewed people, I have chatted with sales professionals, I have talked to people, and they are unwilling to do things that I think are basic: basic customer service, basic uh relationship building. And that is because I have the mindset of being a sales professional 24-7, living it every single day. Does that mean I'm perfect? Uh no. Never gonna be perfect, but the strive for perfection is real. If you don't have that strive for perfection, I don't know if sales is really the right industry for you because sales is a grind. It's a long-term grind. There's gonna be ebbs and flows of great times, and there's gonna be some lean times. There's gonna be some times that you don't have anything to do, or you know, nobody, there's there might be days or weeks where people aren't calling you, that you're not getting any orders. You just have to keep trusting the process, keep moving forward, never giving up. Because you just might be in a lull where you closed a lot of business and you're still trying to move your clients through the sales cycle. So you might just have a lot of people that just haven't been pulled through the funnel yet. And so you still got to keep doing the same thing. You still got to keep prospecting, you still got to keep moving people down that sales process from unaware, away, aware, trial, user, advocate. You have to keep doing that. So, what happens is, and I know it's happened to some people, you know, you have those floods of people coming in, and you're like, oh my gosh, this is great. And then all of a sudden you have that drought, that dry spell. It happens to everybody, it's natural. Now, the goal is to make sure that you have that drought fewer and fewer, shorter and shorter. And the way to do that, you got to start thinking like a sales pro. Stop thinking about what your company can do for you and start thinking about what you can do for your company. I thank you and really appreciate everybody who has been listening. Um, shout out to Erica and Brendan, two of my uh two of my clients. Uh, really do appreciate going above and beyond. And if I didn't name you and you're one of my clients, don't feel bad. You know, I just can't name everybody on the podcast. So thank you all for listening. I really do appreciate it. If you have any questions or you want to know how you can elevate your game from being a sales rep to a sales pro, um, give me a call. Or schedule a call. Excuse me. Schedule a call and reach out to me on LinkedIn. So shoot me a DM. Um, I think I got two or three this week already. Um, this is how most people reach out to me is through LinkedIn. Um, I will be redoing all my platforms uh shortly. It's just been very slow. Uh my youngest daughter just went to kindergarten, so I'm adjusting to being a uh kindergarten dad. And um so yeah, really appreciate it. Everybody who has been uh listening, if you know anybody, you know, send this to anybody who really needs help. Um, like I said before, I'm here to assist everybody in their sales journey on becoming the best version of themselves. So thank you for everybody listening. Do appreciate it, and we'll catch you next time. Surviving outside sales. Cheers.