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Are you good at selling or just lucky?
Why using science & data is the only way to know how good you are at selling.
Christopher Rocas
August 13, 2024 • Read Time: 6 minutes
In my early 20s, I was a high stakes poker player.
On a good day, I’d take home $100-$200k.
Bad day?
Lose half a mill.
It was the most emotionally, mentally, and physically stressful time of my life.
Poker has 3 parts:
Skill
Luck
Emotion
So is sales. You’ll see soon.
Losing with pocket Aces to pocket Kings all in preflop for $50k is unlucky.
In fact, 82% of the time Aces wins.
82% of the time I win $50,000.
18% of the time I lose $50,000.
That means the expected value (EV) of that play is $41,000.
Why tell you this story?
If I lose (unlucky) when I played really well (skill), my mindset could go off the rails (emotion) and cause me to play really bad (skill) which requires me now to get lucky to win.
So what did I do? I started using data to track my play.
Was I running good? or was I running bad?
I outsourced coding to University of Texas engineers to design a program to track my actual winnings versus my expected winnings based on my skill.
Orange line = Should be winnings. Green = Actual. Unlucky.
I always knew after each session if I won or lost because of skill or luck.
“What gets measured gets managed.”
Poker prepared me to be a top 1% dealmaker.
First, answer these:
Do you win because you have the best leads?
Best territory?
How many prospects were already sold before they bought?
Are you different from a buy button?
Could you sell anything anywhere in the world?
Do you source your meetings?
Do you have a BDR?
Is your BDR better than the others?
So you have better meetings?
You get what I’m saying.
There’s a lot of “luck” in sales.
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from any movie…
If You Can't Spot The Sucker In Your First Half Hour, you are the Sucker…
There’s no formal education.
You don’t have a certificate.
The gurus that post online, are they gurus?
Are they telling you correct things?
Was their success boiled down to a few lucky deals?
Are you the sucker for listening?
Are they the sucker and just don’t know it?
3 Sales Pillars
The 2024 Olympics just ended. This section was inspired by the 4 × 400m swimming relays.
Having the best breaststroke doesn’t make you a top 1% swimmer.
Having the best butterfly doesn’t make you a top 1% swimmer.
To be the best swimmer, you have to be in the top 1% in every stroke.
Same with sales.
The three sales pillars are:
Will to sell
Sales DNA
Tactical
Inside each pillar are what Rick & I call selling competencies.
There are 21.
Why does this matter?
You could be the best shooter in the world. Give Stephen Curry a run for his money.
If you’re scared to shoot and miss, does it matter?
That’s your DNA impacting your skills.
Fear vs shooting.
You might be a horrible shooter but think you’re great and fire up 3-pointers at will.
Overconfidence vs lack of skills.
Both examples are a problem.
This all comes back to sales.
Thousands of you are reading this.
Are you in the 1 out of 4 or 3 out of 4 category?
The only answer is “I don’t know.”
Unless you’ve taken an evaluation and know exactly where you stand.
Then I ask, which category are you in?
What now?
This post isn’t about selling evaluations.
This post is about thinking through skill vs luck.
This post is meant to poke your brain and ask “how good am I?”
This post is meant to create self-doubt to improve you.
Think about my poker story...
“Am I winning because I’m better than the other person or just luckier?
You joined this newsletter because you want to be top 1% in skill.
Self-reflection is the first step.
Weekly Challenge
Yes, you will be running a (free) self-evaluation.
Give each competency a self-evaluation ranking of 1-10.
Answer: What proof do you have that your ranking is accurate?
Give 1 possible reason you could be lucky versus skillful in each.
Give the last date you worked on the competency.
Write down what you did to work on it.
Write down what you will do next.
If you aren’t an individual contributor, you can (and should) do this for your team.
There will be some baked-in bias here.
That’s okay.
The first part is awareness.
The second part is working with real evaluations based on science.
Getting a before & after view of yourself.
Here’s a snapshot of it, the official documents are 40+ pages long.
Credit Rick Roberge
Reading this and thinking:
“I want to know where I stand?”
“Am I top 1%, top 25%, or should be changing careers?”
“I want the official evaluation to become a top 1% sales person.”
“I want to have the best sales career I can”
Reply back to this email with the word DNA.
You’ll get a response w/ a Calendly link to a free 15-minute conversation with Rick & I.
Book a call.
Ask a question.
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Until next week,
Chris