The 3 Levers that Separate "Good" Teams and Elite Performers (Money Monday)

0:00This is Jeb Blunt and it's Money Monday on the Sales Gritty Podcast. This is Cheryl Parks, filling in for Jeb Blunt and you are on Money Monday. There was a moment and I remember it pretty clearly when I stopped thinking about raising kids. I realized I was developing performers, I was developing contributing adults. That reframe was huge for me and more importantly what goes into how it's being developed. It didn't happen in a blink of an eye. There was a long path, the end of a relationship, it was a season of life that asked everything of me as a mother and as an individual contributor carrying a number every single day.

1:05I wasn't a sales leader then, I was in the field, I was doing the work and somehow in the middle of all that the framing shifted and when it did, everything about how I showed up changed. As a mother, as an informal leader, as a seller, years later when I began moving into leadership, I brought that same lens with me because here's what I know. Everyone talks about building teams, hiring good people, creating culture and all of that is not wrong but that's not what I think about when I'm inside a business trying to move the needle as a seller or as a leader. There's a difference between a good team and elite performers. Most leaders, if they're honest, have never asked to stop which one they're actually developing. So I'll give you a little bit of background. I became a single mom of two and what felt like a blink but of course it wasn't, it was a long personal road.

2:06One that hit me professionally, just as hard as it hit me personally. For a part of a season, I was simply going through the motions and I don't mean I was lazy. I mean, I lost my discernment. I was doubting every choice from what detergent to buy, to what to eat for dinner, to who needs to be in the meeting, what questions am I asking, how am I connecting any of this to results? So here's a fact that will stop you cold. Researchers using brain scans found that humans have approximately 6,200 thoughts per day, 6,200. Other estimates run as high as 60,000. The number almost doesn't matter because here's the real question. Are your thoughts looping or are they lifting? Mine were looping, same fears, same doubts, same second guessing on repeat. And when your thoughts are looping instead of lifting, you aren't leading. You're not selling, you're surviving.

3:06And pulled me out, wasn't a program or a framework. It was a straight heart to heart with myself. I set my own goals, my own expectations. I created a mantra when that changed over the years as I changed. But I started to just really walk the walk. I became the person I decided I wanted to be one decision at a time. The way to become great at anything is to become elite at making decisions. Professional, professional, financial, spiritual, relational. Not perfect decisions, but developing your decision-making muscle until deciding becomes natural, comfortable, and confident. Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes comfortable, natural, and confident. So there are a few lessons that I learned. The first one is that autopilot isn't rest. It's mediocrity in disguise. I think through the emotions feels like functioning, but it really isn't.

4:07There's a difference between being busy and being present. Elite performers know the difference, and they refuse to confuse the two. The second decision-making is a muscle, neglected, and at atrophies. Every avoided decision, every deferred choice, every I'll figure it out later, weakens the very thing that separates good performers from elite ones. Develop it by using it daily, deliberately, in every area of your life. Third lesson that I learned, you can't separate who you are from how you perform. The season of depletion didn't stay in my personal life. It showed up in every conversation, every call, every decision at work. Your state or your identity is always on the floor with you. The question is whether it's working for you or against you. I lived all of this before I actually had language for it. What I've learned since, the science caught up to everything I stumbled through.

5:08Let me give you an example that's on a little bit of a larger scale. Let's talk about the MBA. The MBA figured this out, and they didn't wait for a leadership book to tell them this, but multiple MBA franchises now have sleep experts on staff. One league-wide memo, individual teams paying dedicated sleep coaches. Why? Because sleep matters to the level of performance. Dr. Sherry Mah, who works with the Golden State Warriors, found that optimizing sleep alone produced a 9% increase in shooting accuracy, 12% faster reaction time, and 4% faster sprint speed, nothing changed but rest. So to give more context, an MBA executive said it plainly, we're not asking our players to just be alive. We're asking them to perform at an elite level against others at an elite level. There's a huge difference between those two things. Sound familiar? That's your sales team every single day.

6:11This is why I stopped managing my time a long time ago. I manage my energy because my energy gets results. My time just passes. Everyone gets the same 24 hours, but energy is a performance input. You can actually influence. You can include things like how you sleep, how you move, when you schedule your hardest conversations, what you say no to, so you have something left for what matters. The MBA built systems around this for basketball. The question is, have you built anything around it for yourself? OK, so let's talk about what elite performance runs on. Let's move into nervous system regulation. Most underperformance in sales is not a sales skill problem. It's a state of mind problem or an identity problem. I worked with a seller, talented, genuinely talented, great listening skills, insightful questions on the surface, calm, direct, composed on the inside, a nervous system roller coaster.

7:17Every time the buyer said something unexpected, the internal voice kicked in. They said this, what do I say now? How do I create momentum? How do I not die in this conversation? That voice is a dish regulated nervous system, and you cannot skill train your way out of it. If the nervous system is dish regulated, the seller is reacting to the buyer instead of leading the conversation. Sales become the roller coaster based on whatever the buyer says next. That's as exhausting and unsustainable as it gets when you're in sales. All right, so let's talk about looking for different levers. So the first lever that I'm going to talk about is stop adding to your cognitive load, like more tools, more dashboards, more meetings, more noise. Leaders think they're helping and they're drowning their people. What you can start doing instead is to remove and refine. So your team's unique differentiators surface and are pied effectively. Less noise means more signal.

8:18Before a high six call or a tough week, anchor in the identity they show up as the mindset, understanding the person they need to become to add value, get clear and aligned. When you are unclear and misaligned, it shows. So that's lever number one. We'll call it state of mind or identity. Now, here's what actually unlocks the performer once the noise is cleared. They get clarity and alignment. Okay, so let's get to the second lever clarity and alignment and results. I call it the car framework. Here's what actually changed for that particular seller that I spoke about earlier. It wasn't a new script. It wasn't more practice. It was clarity alignment and a clear way to track results that they owned. Misalignment is silent. It doesn't show up loud. It shows up as friction. It shows up kind of like a hesitation. That gap before knowing what to say and trusting yourself to say it. Think about it this way. You own a high performance car.

9:19You can have an exceptional engine, a mediocre tires or mediocre suspension. The car will never perform to its potential. Not because the engine isn't powerful, but because everything it needs to run on is improperly aligned for elite performance. Most sellers are trying to say the right thing for the buyer, but the buyer doesn't want the right thing said to them. They want to understand the right thing, period. Hinder service or product truly provide results, solve their problem and provide a return on their investment or their energy or both. That's a completely different job. Okay, so let's talk about what to stop and what to start to support clarity, alignment, and results, you know, the car framework. So stop trying to be who you think the buyer wants you to be. Not being clear on the specific problems you solve and how they impact the company, the team, and the people you're calling on. That ambiguity is costing you deals. Here's what we can start doing. Start with the foundational questions at the core.

10:20What's your why for being in sales? What's your why for staying in sales and being determined to be elite at it? What are the company's values that directly touch the client? How do your personal values align with those? What results when delivered positively impact the customer's world? Answer those questions and your messaging rights itself. So we have regulation, clarity, alignment, now the third lever, and the one that makes the other two visible and real time decision velocity. Elite performers don't make perfect decisions. They make fast committed decisions and they adjust in real time. The goal isn't better judgment. It's shorter lag time between signal and response. So 6,200 thought today or maybe 60,000. If those thoughts are looping, which looks like doubt, hesitation. What do I say next? Decision velocity collapses. The conversation stalls, the deal stalls, the pipeline stalls. A regulated aligned seller makes decisions in the room in real time.

11:25They read the buyer, they move, they adjust. This is what it looks like from the outside. On the inside, it's a nervous system that isn't constantly fighting or lying to itself. So what to stop and what to start in lever number three? What to stop? Stop being inconsistent with feedback. One minute in action is great. The next, it should have been done differently. Being all over the place about what matters, your team can't build decision velocity on a moving target. What to start? Be consistent. If there's a differentiation between reps or deals stated explicitly, behind closed doors in the team meeting or whatever makes sense, coaching all team members on their specific roles on the team can be complex. Get specific about the actions that drive results, which are discovery, demos, proposals, whatever it is for your team. The goal is obvious to you, it may not be obvious to them. State the results you're driving forward to reach. I'm Cheryl Parks, InfraJet Blunt on Monday Mondays.

12:25You can find me at sales gravy university and on most social media channels as the sales growth coach or undermining Cheryl Parks. Survival of the finish, you could sink a swim. I've been broke, I ain't never going back again. I need some C notes, some cheddar and a stack of ends. I need a bowl of dough, I don't need no Facebook friends. I need a pack of new snaps, a handful of fitting wipes and rubber band on my green bags.