Sales Outliers – Meet the top Sales People

The Sales Outliers
Meet the Unique Players in the Selling Game

What does a Sales Outlier track in their mind to take command of the sales conversation that average salespeople don’t?

Did you ever wonder how the elite in your field do what they do? Ever since I began exploring the world of NLP and coaching, I’ve been fascinated by one thing: modelling what experts actually do to get great results and excel in their field.

So how do they do what they do?

If I learned one thing from reading countless books in this field, it’s this: to achieve excellence, you have to find out how somebody does what they do, how they think about their experience, and how they execute their strategy. It’s what prompted me to dig into the world of selling and uncover what the top sales people actually do.

I’ve written about what I learned in this ebook. Inside, you’ll find real insights from the conversations I had with a number of exceptional salespeople.

If you’re looking for the best-practice mindset and selling behaviours behind consistent success, this book could give you the clarity that changes the quality of your next sales call. And if you’re a sales manager, it might be exactly what brings your team to a whole new level.

Looking for Patterns, and Why I Wrote This E-book

As I observed patterns of success in the people I met in the sales world, I kept coming back to the same questions: What do top sales people do that other sales professionals don’t? What’s the pattern that makes people successful in sales meetings? What pieces of psychology are we missing in selling? Is it possible to design and create a sales conversation to get better results? Do we need to pay more attention to language and mindset when learning how to sell? Who is doing this really well, and how can other salespeople harness those behaviours and that mindset?

I always believed selling had a structure. So I took a blank piece of paper and started mapping out what actually happens in a sales meeting when a buyer and a seller come together. That led to more questions:

How do a buyer and seller converse in a way that moves the conversation toward a deal?

What are they actually thinking during that conversation?

How do the best sales people get the decision going in their favour?

What are the triggers that bring a sale over the line?

It became a process of splicing apart conversations and behaviours to get to the core of what really makes a sale, and what was actually going on beneath the surface of those sales conversations.

The Patterns Reveal Themselves

Selling isn’t just about making the call, getting the lead into the pipeline, having the meeting, handling objections, and winning the deal. That’s the sales pipeline process, and the process alone won’t win the deal.

A great sales process won’t win the sale if you don’t know how to create and replicate effective, high-quality sales conversations.

When I’m figuring out where a company needs upskilling in their sales team, I’m far more interested in the sales conversation itself and the buyer’s decision-making process than in the process on paper. That’s what actually tells me how well a salesperson is doing, and where the real gaps for coaching and training are. That’s where the gold is in improving sales results.

Language and Semantics Are at the Heart of Great Selling

The more I explored selling behaviours, the more I realised that language and semantics, the meaning we give to experience, played a huge part in how well a salesperson performed. It wasn’t just what they said to their buyers. It was how they mapped their own world of selling, how they talked to themselves internally, and the meaning they attached to everything they experienced along the way. I came to a clear conclusion: the how behind the what of selling is where people need the most clarity and skill.

It was never really about the steps. It was about the buying experience itself, and how to systematically create that experience, consistently, for every buyer. That’s the part most people, even excellent salespeople and sales managers, struggle to consciously replicate across a hired sales team.

Once I’d mapped it out, I started sharing it with clients who wanted to shift the selling behaviours in their sales teams, understand how their people actually conversed with clients, and track the results. From there, the training and coaching became about teaching a mindset, mapping conversation strategy, and building real awareness of how each salesperson was showing up in conversation with every buyer.

Watching that shift happen showed me something important: salespeople aren’t always conscious of how they’re communicating with their buyers, and as a result, they can leave significant deals on the table without ever realising it.

Of course, we can’t win every deal. But there are always some left on the table simply because of the nature and quality of the conversation between buyer and seller.

Finding People Who Are Top of Their Selling Game

I wasn’t content to rely only on what I’d learned through my own experimenting and research. So I went looking for salespeople with a genuine reputation for being at the top of their game. I interviewed exceptional sales people across a broad range of industries and countries to find out what they actually did, every time, in a conversation with a buyer. They were genuinely impressive.

Talking to these people, I was listening for one common thread: something they were doing consistently and differently that generated exceptional results, conversation after conversation. They were operating from a different compass entirely. I found real, repeatable traits and strategies that set them apart, and it confirmed everything I’d already been sharing with clients. They had a solid, consistent sales mindset, and structured, repeatable conversation patterns, and that’s exactly what gave them better results than their competitors, time and again. I call these people Sales Outliers.

So What Is an Outlier, and What Makes Them Different?

out·li·er — 1: something that is situated away from, or classed differently from, a main or related body. 2: a statistical observation markedly different in value from others in the sample.

To understand what set these people apart, I asked deep questions: about their beliefs on selling, on money, on their own products, their thinking, their emotions inside a sales meeting, what they noticed about themselves in the moment, and, most importantly, why they did what they did, with whom, and when. The patterns and themes in their answers were remarkably consistent.

What I learned is that this group of sales professionals are self-defining. They’re the cream of the crop in their game. They consistently exceed their targets, and they’re rewarded, quarter after quarter, for their skill and know-how in winning new business and new clients.

This ebook is the result of those conversations, combined with my own years of experience in the field of sales. It confirms everything I believe about the skill set behind great salespeople, and just how dynamic and talented they genuinely are in the art of creating powerful sales conversations. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who took the time to talk with me and contribute to this work. They know who they are, and some of them are quoted directly in the ebook.

I hope this book gives you the same benefit I got from exploring the world of the people I call The Sales Outliers. You’ll get a real glimpse into how they think. You’ll learn what makes them different. And you’ll walk away with ideas you can apply directly to your own selling game. Take the time to learn what they do and why they do it, so your next sales quarter looks genuinely different from where you’re standing today. Enjoy.

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