The 7 Skills That Predict Sales Success (Long before results show up)

Sales success isn’t random. It’s predictable.

Long before the results show up on a leaderboard, certain behaviours quietly separate top performers from everyone else. In this episode, we break down the seven skills that consistently forecast long-term success in sales — regardless of industry, territory, or experience level.

You’ll discover why emotional control under pressure matters more than charisma, how curiosity outperforms convincing, and why structured thinking closes more deals than raw enthusiasm. We explore the hidden advantages of discomfort tolerance, ownership of the buying process, and rapid feedback integration — the traits that compound over time into elite performance.

These aren’t personality traits. They’re trainable disciplines.

If you want to increase deal size, improve consistency, and accelerate your career trajectory, this episode gives you a clear diagnostic framework. Rate yourself across all seven skills — and you’ll quickly see where your next breakthrough lies.

Because in sales, results lag skill development.

Build the right capabilities, and success becomes far less accidental.

Follow the show for practical insights designed for sales professionals who intend to outperform — not participate.

Welcome to the podcast!

Transcript

Emotional Regulation Under Pressure

Curiosity Over Convincing

Identity-Level Confidence

Structured Thinking In Deals

Discomfort Tolerance And Silence

Owning The Buying Process

Fast Feedback And Debriefs

Recap, Self-Assessment And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Some salespeople win early, others struggle for years. And this is not about talent, it's not about territory. It's basically about building a set of skills that will serve you as you build your sales career. And that's the focus of this particular podcast. So before I dive into it, my name is Graeme Elliott from Salescraft Training. And please remember to like, subscribe if you feel I've earned it at the end of this podcast. And please tell your friends, your sales manager, anybody else you know. So I'm going to dive straight in with one that most people get completely wrong. And excuse me, this is emotional regulation under pressure. So, in other words, how you handle things when it feels like the sale is starting to go wrong or things happen that you weren't expecting. So, examples of that might be a pushback from a buyer where they're asking for a discount. This can be objection handling, how you deal with objections when they come up, particularly late in the sale. Late stage silence from the buyer when everything goes quiet. How do you handle that? And also just tension in the procurement process if something feels like it's going wrong. So, what's the way to handle this? Well, the first thing is to stay calm, second thing is to just slow things down and really look at what's going on, look at how you got to this particular point and what are the clues, were there clues there that you missed? And the final thing is to just ask better questions. So if you're in that situation, you need to think of the questions you need to ask to get out of it. And there are some other skills actually come into play here that I'm going to talk about in this podcast as well. But ask the right questions, just go to the heart of it. The important thing is that emotional stability allows you to preserve your authority in the sale and remember that as salespeople, we are also leaders, we're leading the sales process. So it's really important to understand that. So a couple of things you can do, in addition to what I've already said, is to use the three-second pause rule before responding to objections. So that does two things, it gives you some thinking time if you need it, but also by slowing things down and operating at your pace, at your time, and you preserve or you preserve authority. And then just label the tension if there is attention instead of reacting to it. And the most thing and the most important thing to do is not to react, it's to step back, look at what's going on, make some sort of call on that, and then move forward based on that. I'm gonna use the word analysis, but that implies that you spend a lot of time looking at it. That it definitely is not necessary, but make sure you have that time to look at what's going on. Skill number two is curiosity over convincing. So, what I mean by that, and this is something I've spoken about a lot, and I'm gonna speak about it again, and that's where weak salespeople tend to pitch. And the reason they pitch is that there's safety. If you're talking, your client can't ask you awkward questions or object to anything or do any of that. So it these are people who are really frightened of losing control, so they'll pitch, they'll they'll read a brochure at their client, and it's one of the fastest way, uh fastest ways of turning somebody off. So strong salespeople investigate, in other words, what they're doing is asking a lot of questions. So if you're looking for predictive signals of how good somebody is at this particular skill, look at the ratio of questions to statements. So, again, when we are pitching, we're making statements, we're not asking questions, we're not inviting the client to interact with us, which is absolutely suicide if you're trying to um bring in a deal. And also look at the depth of follow-up questions. So, whether you're evaluating somebody else or evaluating yourself, these are the objective measures you can look at to see how well you're doing and also what needs work. So the highest performing salespeople will explore impact and they're not so interested in surface pain. So, in other words, they're gonna deep dive or going deeper to what the real problems are that need solving, which are not always what the client is going to give you up front for whatever reason. What they'll then do is diagnose their solution against the under the problem as they understand it before they prescribe any solution. So it's a little a little bit of a medical way of describing it. But in other words, they will make sure they clearly understand what the issues are for the client, they will summarize and feed that back to the client to make sure that the client and the salesperson are on the same page, that the the problem and ideal solution have been correctly identified, and there's also a level of agreement before then going into the phase of talking about the solution. So the way to work this is to identify the problem, look at the impact that that problem is having. What are the consequences of that problem, of that impact? These could be personal, they could be business, but you need to understand what the impact is. And also identify the cost of inaction because this is really helpful in moving deals along and also in qualifying and allowing you to measure who you're going to be spending your time with. Because if the cost of inaction is very high, then clearly there is a strong need to implement a solution. But if it's quite low, there may not be that same necessity to push things forward. Skill number three is identity level confidence. This is about internal strength in the case of the salesperson. It's not about being loud, it's not about browbeating people. But the signals we're looking for here is just willingness to challenge a buyer. If they have made an incorrect statement for whatever reason, be willing to channel challenge it because normally it will be because of a miscommunication or a misunderstanding. What's the comfort level? If this is you, what's your comfort level when asking direct budget or timeline questions? You need to be comfortable asking those questions because without them, you can really be spinning your wheels and getting nowhere. And also a really important one is the ability to say this might we might not be a fit for your problem. And the key thing is confidence comes from clarity, it's not about personality. This is a learned skill. So what you do in a practical sense is to move from often the question is do they like me? A lot of salespeople look to be liked, and you need to move that back to the a more sensible and more useful question, which is am I leading this process effectively? Skill number four is structured thinking. So again, high-performing sellers' thinking frameworks. So you're looking at clear meeting objectives. Do you have those when you go into a meeting? Are you very clear on why the meeting is taking place, what you need to cover in that meeting, and what you want as outcomes? Control deal progression, how are you moving this deal forward? Are you working with clearly defined next steps? Do you have a clear framework that you're working to? So all of these are really important because without them, deals will drift. Often the buyer will be the person in control, and you will lose control of the sale, which means that you have a much higher chance of losing the sale itself, and you'll be spending a lot more time on it than you need to. With that structure in place, you can move deals forward. So, whatever that structure needs to be for you, I don't know what you sell, but it's well worth sitting down, having a cup of coffee or whatever it is you do, macho or whatever, and um just thinking through what the sales process is that you need to follow and apply that structure to your approach to sales meetings, especially because meetings are very expensive from a um a cost of the business point of view, so you really need to be getting the absolute maximum from them. So, an example could be just qualification, just going through the criteria. What's the budget? Who holds the budget? Who has the sign-off authority? How urgent is this, and what are the consequences of inaction, particularly, but also understanding the consequences because they may be significant of implementing your solution. The next thing is discomfort tolerance. So this is um quite an important one because we're really looking at the willingness that a salesperson has to ask hard questions, to push back on discounts when somebody's trying to get you to give a discount, to call senior decision makers, to have that conversation with maybe C-suite level people, but to go as high up in the management chain of your um customer's business as you need to. And also your comfort with sitting in silence. Sometimes there's a there there is an amazing power, it's not just sometimes, silence is very, very powerful. Some buyers know this, and I've certainly had situations where um a buyer's myself and a buyer being very quiet, and then he he will say something like, Well, are you going to speak first or am I? But generally the deal is whoever speaks first kind of gives in. So joking aside, silence is really, really powerful, and salespeople who are not confident will tend to speak because they're really uncomfortable in the silence. And then if you do that, you you have lost authority in driving that sale. And personal growth lives in the awkward moments, frankly. So if you're willing to step in, ask those hard questions, push back on discounts, call senior decision makers, and sit with silence, then these can really stretch you. So it would be time well spent to make sure that at least once a week you stretch yourself with in one of those areas if you can. Now, number six, so the sixth skill that I want to just highlight is ownership of the buying process. So I've already alluded to this a little bit, that this again is really important because weak salespeople, the low performers, will be led by the buyer, they will let the buyer drive the whole process, they are not in control, they do not have authority. It means that their forecasts are really um weak, they're unreliable, um, their chances of closing deals are much lower because they're not staying in control of the whole whole process. And when that happens, the chances are somebody else will, like a competitor, will step in. So, as a strong salesperson, what your job to do is to guide the buyers through the buying process. And if you're looking at predictive signals, how well you're doing this area in this area, or how well are people who work for you doing, how clear are they about the next steps? What how are they controlling the calendar? How are they managing meeting schedules? How are they how well defined are the timelines, whether it's the ultimate purchase date or the dates of next steps? These things really need to be understood very well. And again, top salespeople will know exactly what those steps are, they'll know what's coming next, though they will understand how one step leads into the successful conclusion to the sale or otherwise. So the kind of language you want to think about or you want to look for is rather than using um terms like let me know what you think if a client's talking to um uh sorry, a salesperson is talking to a client, rather than ask let me know what you think, use something like, Well, the next logical step is whatever that step is. Does Tuesday or Thursday work for you to set up a meeting, get information back, do whatever it is that has to be done? But what you're doing there is clearly identifying and agreeing with the client what the next step is, and then you are getting it in the diary. You are getting a commitment that this is when this next step can be reasonably expected to complete. So, this is about leadership and it's about um increasing close rates. Now, another thing that is really important, um this relates to ownership and also buying science, is just understanding what the real buying signals are in real time. And in the next episode, which will uh be available in one week, it will come out on the Monday, and this is exactly what we're gonna look at. This is exactly what we're going to start unpacking, and that's buying signals that most salespeople miss. Because if you can't see the signals, you can't lead the process. So that's next time, and the final skill that I want to cover in this podcast, so this is skill number seven, is feedback. How quickly do you or the people you're working with integrate feedback? So, what do I mean by that? Well, this is basically after a meeting, after meeting with a client or a demonstration, whatever it might be, how quickly does somebody adjust after something has happened? So, this could be losing a deal, it could be getting coaching, whether that's from it might be self-coaching, it might be from a sales manager, it might be from an external source. But how quickly do they adjust, how quickly do they integrate uh coaching? And how quickly do they adjust after hearing an objection repeatedly? So if you're getting the same objection repeatedly, it's really important that you understand where that's coming from. Uh, it might be lack of communication, it might be fear on the part of the buyer, but where's it coming from and how do you deal with it? And um, I do teach techniques to make that really, really easy. So the measure here, and what top salespeople will do, is have a debrief, debrief themselves or debrief with somebody else after every win, every loss. So just to look at what worked well, what didn't work well, what can be improved, what can be changed. Does the sales structure need to change? Is there some personal skill that needs work? But this is really important. This is not about beating yourself up, this is about stepping back and being very objective about how things went and looking at what can be learned. This is the most important thing. Top salespeople are always learning. They're also looking at patterns, which could be in their own performance, but also in clients and how the deal progresses. Are there certain points, points where things tend to get a bit sticky? Are there patterns that stand out? And again, if you look at your own um situation, are there patterns you can identify that you can make use of in some way? They will also look at refining scripts if they're using them, but definitely refining questions. And this is really important because if you've got a great set of questions, first of all, your qualification process will be far more effective, and also you'll you'll be able to really get in and understand what the key drivers are for a client. And one of the most important skills to or one of the most important things to recognize from looking at patterns and also asking questions is simply to recognize that this may not be a good fit. So if you're not a good fit, step away or at least discuss it with the client, because this is one of the most common errors I've seen in underperforming salespeople. They don't know when to step away from a bad deal, and they will waste their time on it when they their time would be far better spent looking for a different client and a better deal. So to summarize all of this, and I guess just to quickly go through what I've just spoken about. So the first one was emotional regulation under pressure, stay calm, slow things down. Skill number two was curiosity over convincing. So always be curious. You're not trying to convince the client. In fact, if you do the job right, the client may well be convincing you that they should be buying from you. And I've had this, and it's fun, makes life a lot easier. Skill number three was identity level confidence. So, in other words, in other words, having that confidence to step in and lead, to challenge buyers, um, to ask direct questions, to and maybe even to um say that things might not be a good fit. Skill number four is structured thinking, so have a structure when you approach meetings. So, what are the objectives? Why have you called the meeting in the first place? What you need to resolve within that meeting, and what is the outcome that you're looking for? So have a clear structure. Number five is being tolerant of discomfort, being happy with discomfort, uh, being willing to step up into an area where you're not so comfortable. So this is asking hard questions, pushing back on discounts, this kind of thing. Number six was ownership of the buying process. So you need to lead the client. That is absolutely fundamental. And number seven is implementing feedback, having a system of feedback, whether it's something you do on your own with somebody else, and then implementing those things directly. So I'm gonna leave you with a couple of things to think about. One is which skill of the things that I've spoken about is your bottleneck? Where can you identify that you need to take action? Which one of those feels uncomfortable, and which one, if improved, would unlock the most revenue for you? And you can even rate yourself on the scale of one to ten in each each category just to give you something objective. So the important thing to remember here is that results lag skill development. So if you start developing a skill, your chances are you won't see an improvement immediately, but it will come in time, and this will also be impacted by your buying cycles. One thing you can do here is to just share this with a teammate. Um maybe check each other out on how you're doing in each skill. Uh, please leave a subscription if you think I've earned it and a like, and um please recommend me to other people. So that's it for today. As I say, next time I'm going to be looking at the buying signals that most salespeople miss because these are clearly very important. So I hope you found this useful and I'll speak to you next time. Bye for now.