It may seem paradoxical but in my experience some of the most successful salespeople are not necessarily the ones who work the hardest.

In the early stages of my career, I worked with a man who we shall call “Thomas”.

He was a charming, charismatic kind of person who was friendly and well liked within the business. He had a beautiful wife, happy high achieving kids and a healthy lifestyle surrounded by great friends and family.  Not only did he have his personal life in order, but he was also consistently in the top 3 high achievers in the business nationally for both sales and customer satisfaction.  He worked on the largest accounts and would regularly write deals that were 5-10 times the value of the average operator.

Better still, he didn’t seem to work that hard!

Because he was so good at looking after his customers, he received a high level of personal referrals to key prospects – business seemed to just fall out of the sky and into his lap.  He only handled the high value tasks that required his personal attention and handballed everything off to others (with developing salespeople like me feeling grateful for the smaller deals he gave them).

Each Friday he would clock off at midday to take clients or introducers out to lunch earning the nickname of “Sir Lunchalot” (little did we realise at the time that his weekly targets were usually achieved by Wednesday afternoon through focused actions early in the week while the rest of us were still scrambling Friday afternoon to get everything through).

Then, one day he won a fabulous new car in a raffle that he’d bought tickets in to support a client’s fundraising for charity. As he had a fully maintained company vehicle, he promptly sold the car and used the money as a deposit on an investment property.

Geez – this guy was the happiest, laziest and luckiest person ever!!!!

Or was he?

It is common to see the top 20% of salespeople write 80% of the group’s results (Pareto’s Law).

They do this not by working more hours, but by being more deliberate, strategic and focused – doing the right activities in the right ways consistently to create valued outcomes with more ease and less effort.  They seem to do less work than other team members and are also happier in themselves and their role.   They don’t get caught up in the minutia, drama or stories about why things can’t work as they’re busy just getting on with it with a can-do attitude.

They achieve results that they’re proud of, love what they do and have plenty of energy left to enjoy their life outside of work as well.

On the outside, it looks like they’re just lucky.  Everything they touch seems to turn to gold.

The truth is that they’re working smarter not harder, with the mindset, habits, time management and disciplines that create mastery.   Success comes easy to them because of the work they’ve done to set themselves up first through training, practice, coaching and feedback.

The trick to being lucky, lazy, happy and successful is to master the high leverage activities and do them better than anyone else.

The harder we work at mastering the process, the luckier we get with results and the easier everything becomes.  Luck happens when preparation meets opportunities.

And this …. is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Successful sales habits can be taught.

Mastery can be achieved through focused and consistent discipline.

It all starts with knowing what works!

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