4 Needle Movers Top Sales Reps Use to Smash Quota (Money Monday)

This is Jeb Blunt, and it's Money Monday on the Sales Gravy Podcast. Make money, money, money, money. Make money, money, money, money. Money makes the world go round. I'm gonna talk around town. Remy gave me the Hi. This is Brad Adams, senior master trainer at Sales Gravy, and I'm filling in for Jeb Blunt. And you're listening to Money Monday. Today, we're talking about the artificial ceilings that we build in our own minds. Now many people know about the four minute mile, the story of Roger Bannister. On 05/06/1954, that was a long time ago, he broke through the legendary four minute mile barrier with a time of three minutes fifty nine and four tenths of a second. Now runners had been chasing that goal, seriously chasing that goal, since at least 1886. So for nearly seventy years, the most brilliant coaches, the most gifted athletes in North America, Europe, and Australia strove against the clock, and the clock always won. Frankly, it had become a massive psychological barrier as well as a physical one. Runners were able to get so close, but the closer they got, the more daunting it became, until it wasn't. And you know what happened next? Within weeks of Bannister breaking it, other runners started doing it too. Nelson Mandela famously said, It always seems impossible until it's done. Now sales quotas are a very interesting concept to me. Companies assign a quota to their reps based on lag indicators and the revenue goals of the business. And that makes sense. And for most reps, their entire psychological target is to hit the quota. But that mindset can be deeply limiting. When your sole focus is on hitting quota, you're staring at a lag indicator. The salespeople who smash targets, who consistently move the bar higher and higher, the ultra high performers, if you will, are not focused on what they're supposed to do. They look internally, and they focus on their own lead indicators and input behaviors rather than the revenue target itself. They focus on what is possible, or maybe even what others think is impossible. I worked with a client that sells capital equipment. For years, the highest monthly sales total ever was achieved by a single rep, and that stood at $750,000 worth of equipment. It was their four minute mile. And it was an unbreakable ceiling. But one year, two reps exceeded $850,000 in the same exact month. And then nine months later, a rep beat $1,000,000 in sales. I have another client in manufacturing where the top reps were selling a very highly respectable $400,000 a month. But at the end of the year, there was one rep that broke the 1,000,000 monthly threshold they called a million dollar mic. And he didn't do it just once as a fluke. He followed up with five out of the next six months where he sold over $1,000,000 in sales. I even saw it with a bank that …