- If you had to choose one characteristic that separates the top salespeople from the rest, what would it be? Are top performers more extroverted? Are they more competitive? Are they better at setting goals? Nope. It turns out the one quality that separates top performers from the rest is grit. Grit is the personality trait defined by psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Duckworth's research suggests that the amount of grit a person has, in other words their grittiness, has a bigger impact on their success than their IQ or talent. But what does grit look like? Many people mistakenly believe grit is another word for self-control. These personality traits are related, but they aren't synonymous. Self-control is about short-term choices like resisting the urge to procrastinate. Meanwhile, grit is about long-term choices. Maybe you stay in sales despite having a hard first year or go to school so you can become a sales engineer. Here are the top three attributes of gritty people. One, they're courageous. Being courageous helps in goal setting. If you're not brave, you'll go after relatively easy targets. If you're willing to challenge yourself and can accept the potential risks, you'll set ambitious targets. Even if you don't completely hit the mark, you'll be more successful. To give you an idea of what this looks like, suppose you commit to making 150% of your number. You're still ahead of where you would have been if you make 120% even though you may have technically failed to hit your stretch goal. Number two, gritty people are passionate. To stay invested in a goal for years and years, you can't feel lukewarm about it. That's why passion is a critical component of grit. The more passionate you are, the likely you are to keep going even when things get tough. There's nothing wrong with working in sales because the money and validation is rewarding. Many salespeople are motivated by those things, but that's different from finding true enjoyment in working with and helping prospects independent of the paycheck or the ego boost. Number three, gritty people are ambitious but realistic. It might seem counterintuitive, but gritty people aren't usually perfectionists. Perfection is an impossible standard. Most of the time, you fall a little short. So, if you're always trying to be perfect, you'll always be disappointed and you'll probably be tempted to give up. Rather than setting impossibly lofty goals, recognize what nearly perfect looks like. Leave room for a few mistakes. As Duckworth has shown in her research, people who take failure as an opportunity to learn and grow do much better in the long run. Courageous, passionate, and ambitious but realistic, that sounds like a great combination of traits for anyone to have. So, how do you increase your grit? Here are four exercises that will help. One, reframe your setbacks. Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says this. "People who don't give up "have a habit of interpreting setbacks "as temporary, local, and changeable." This optimism allows them to reframe their difficult experiences from debilitating obstacles to learning opportunities. Next time you fail, take a step back and evaluate how you're thinking about the misstep. A less resilient salesperson might think, this problem is going to last a long time and affect multiple aspects of my life or work and there's nothing I can do to fix it. On the other hand, a resilient one would think, the situation isn't ideal, but I can resolve it quickly with minimal consequences. The second exercise to increase your grit is called the ABC model. Some people respond to adversity with anxiety, which usually leads to self-defeating behavior. But people who gritty stay calm and identify if there's anything productive they can do to improve the situation. If you get overly stressed when you encounter issues, try psychologist and researcher Albert Ellis' ABC model. Ellis designed this model to help people cope with adversity. First, identify the A, the Activating event or trigger for your negative emotions. Then two, recognize the B, your Beliefs or explanation for why the activating event happened. Last, establish the C, the Consequences or how you feel and what you do because of the event and your emotions. In other words, A plus B equals C. This exercise distinguishes productive reactions from unproductive ones. Here's an example. A, a major deal falls through at the last minute. B, I didn't spend enough time during discovery figuring out how my prospect's buying process works. So, I was blindsided when she needed a signature from an unexpected stakeholder. I'm not a good salesperson. I'm not gonna meet quota this quarter. C, I feel panicky, insecure, and embarrassed. I don't wanna call any new prospects. Once you've finished working through A, B, and C, classify each belief as reasonable or unrealistic. Well, it's fair to say you failed to fully investigate your prospect's buying process. That oversight doesn't make you a bad salesperson. It also doesn't mean you're going to miss your quarterly quota. Next, separate your reactions into healthy and unhealthy. Feeling negative is normal. However, you can't let those feelings stop you from calling prospects. Analyzing your mindset helps you calm down, gain perspective, and avoid responding irrationally. Once you've identified your unhealthy reactions, you'll be able to reign them in and respond better next time. Third, identify the silver lining. Repressing negative feelings isn't healthy or productive, so if you're worried, upset, angry, frustrated, and so on, don't tell yourself you're fine. What can you do? Recognize the upside of the bad situation. For example, if one of your biggest accounts goes to your competitor, you might think, losing this customer is going to significantly impact my numbers for the next year. At the same time, they were growing at a rate that our services team and platform couldn't really support. Now we can focus on smaller accounts who are a better fit for our business. According to Barbara Fredrickson, PhD and author of Positivity, identifying one or two silver linings to every situation instead of focusing only on the consequences you're not happy about increases your resiliency. Fredrickson also talks about the positivity ratio which is a person's ratio of noticed positive to noticed negative experiences. She says that in order to thrive, your positivity ratio needs to be at least three to one. She recommends making an effort to identify random positive experiences in day-to-day life and writing down things that you're grateful for from the past week improves your mood and optimism according to a study from Dr. Robert Emmons of the University of California-Davis and Dr. Michael McCullough of the University of Miami. Try writing down positive experiences every night or at the end of the week. The fourth exercise for building grit, be literal. Are you prone to generalizing statements like, I'm a horrible negotiator or I'll never be a top rep? Fredrickson says this type of thinking triggers emotional patterns. In other words, one gloomy thought can trap you in a loop of pessimistic thinking. Fortunately, you can break out by getting literal. Next time you have a negative thought like, my rapport building skills are awful, ask yourself, what proof do I have for that statement? Maybe you struggled to connect with the buyers on your last two calls, but you had a great connection with the prospects you spoke to this morning. You can clearly build rapport. You just struggled in those two meetings. You could also ask yourself, has my ability to put people at ease and get along with them improved since I started selling? If yes, you can expect your rapport building skills will continue to improve with practice. To sum up, the importance of grit in sales can't be overstated. Gritty salespeople are courageous, passionate, and ambitious but realistic. They're also resilient enough to cope with the frequently rejection every salesperson faces. So, try out the four exercises we talked through and you'll be able to survive and even thrive in trying times.
