Recently, I did a deep dive into the performance of two sellers at one of my clients. The client and I wanted to understand exactly what drove the performance differences between them.
On the surface, they looked identical.
They had similar backgrounds and experience levels. Their territories were nearly the same, mostly focused on new accounts. They had been through the same training, used the same tools, and worked under the same compensation plan. They even had the same manager, who did a decent job of coaching them both.
But their results were profoundly different.
One seller consistently beat her goals. Year over year, she would meet and exceed her number. Sometimes she barely made it, sometimes she blew past it, but the over-attainment was consistent.
The other seller was capable, but his performance was inconsistent. One year he barely beat his number. The next year was a big miss. The following year he hit 87%, followed by another significant miss the last year of the analysis.
Given the similarities, selling the same products to similar customers with the same support, training, tools, and coaching; what caused the difference?
There had to be something else.
The difference was their Mindsets and Behaviors.
When we dug deeper, we found they had completely different attitudes.
The top performer was deeply curious. When she hit a roadblock, she didn’t stop; she experimented. She was intensely customer-focused. She didn’t just pitch products; she dove into what the customer was trying to achieve. In every deal, she learned and adapted.
Crucially, she never made excuses. When she lost a deal, she didn’t blame the product or the price; she looked at what she could change for next time. She was disciplined enough to do the tedious work—the internal approvals, the procurement battles, the proposal building. She organized her time to be efficient.
You can probably guess what we found with the other seller.
His behaviors were almost the opposite. He seemed to be “going through the motions.” He followed the playbook and read the scripts, but he never probed deeply. He didn’t build trust; he was just another vendor.
When he hit a roadblock, he gravitated toward excuses. “They’re ghosting me,” he’d say about a qualified customer. But he never explored how to change that dynamic; he just gave up. He just kept sending emails, “Did you get my last email to meet….” He stuck to the easy parts of the job, like demoing, and avoided the gritty work required to get complex deals across the line.
So, what is the difference? What can we learn from these two very different sellers?
It wasn’t the territory. It wasn’t the product, training, tools, processes. It was the mindset and behaviors each brought into the job.
When we look at sellers within a company, everyone has access to the same “hardware,” the tools, the training, the support. The real variable in performance is the “software,” the mindsets and behaviors of the individual.
If we want to replicate the success of the first seller, we have to stop assuming that experience, work history, past achievements on a resume equals competence in the field. We need to focus on three specific areas:
1. Hire for the mindset, not just the track record. Most of the time, we recruit based on past employers and quotas hit. We have no way of knowing if that past success was skill or just luck (like a hot territory). We rarely assess for the things that actually matter: Curiosity. Accountability. Discipline. The ability to deal with ambiguity. If we don’t interview for these traits, we risk hiring people who are satisfied with “good enough.”
2. Build behaviors into the training. Just training people on a sales methodology produces limited, unsustainable results. But if you train them on how to be curious and customer-focused within that methodology, it changes everything. If we introduce accountability and discipline in how they leverage the tools, they will get more value in their use of those tools.
3. Leaders must model it. Why should we expect our teams to demonstrate accountability if their leaders don’t? If managers don’t model curiosity, customer-centricity, and caring every day, their people never will.
The bottom line
Take a look at your own team. You likely have a few sellers right now who look great on paper but are inconsistent in reality.
We often try to “fix” these sellers by giving them more product training or tightening their KPIs. But the gap in their performance isn’t usually a lack of skill; it’s a lack of will. It’s the mindset.
You can give a seller the best tools in the world, but you cannot automate curiosity, and you cannot script accountability. Those have to be hired for, coached, and modeled. Everything else is just noise.
Afterword: I do a deep dive into these issues in my new book, Is “Good Enough” Good Enough, Mindsets and Behaviors for Sales Excellence. It’s being released in the next couple of weeks.
Afterword: Here is another amazing AI based discussion of this post. Enjoy!
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