A sales year is mostly a run of events. The big deal, the competitive bid, the quarterly review, the two day course, the kick off, the appraisal. They’re the moments everyone remembers, and they’re where people get judged.
They’re also where nobody improves. An event puts you under a light and shows what you can do. It doesn’t add anything to what you could do the week before. Whatever you bring into the room is what you’ve got, and by then it’s far too late to change it.
Stretch that out over a few years and it reads the same. Careers in this job rarely turn on the big moments. They turn on what was happening in the long stretches in between, when nothing was at stake and nobody was watching.
The old line about preparation, and what it actually said
Bobby Knight wrote something in 1979 that now circulates in a much tidier form than he ever used. His version was that the will to win is grossly overrated as a way of winning. What matters far more, he said, is the will to prepare to win. The idea wasn’t originally his either. Fielding Yost, who coached football at Michigan, was making the same point back in 1929.
It has lasted a hundred years because it’s true in an uncomfortable way. Everybody wants the deal, or the promotion, or the bigger patch. Wanting any of it changes nothing on the day. What changes things is the work that made you capable of it, and that happened weeks earlier, when nothing much was riding on anything.
What the space between events actually looks like
In a sales job, that space isn’t dramatic. It’s an ordinary Tuesday.
- Reading the customer’s results statement properly before a first meeting, rather than skimming the website on the way in.
- Writing out the difficult question you know is coming, and working out an answer you’d be happy to give.
- Going back over a call that didn’t land to find where it turned, instead of putting it down to a bad fit.
- Asking someone in finance to explain how the businesses you sell into make their money.
- Working out how your own company makes its margin, so you know what’s yours to give away and what isn’t.
- Trying a different route to a stakeholder you’ve never reached, on a deal small enough that it doesn’t matter if it fails.
None of it takes long. None of it is visible to anybody. And nothing in the week asks for it.
The people who get better fastest do it anyway
In twenty five years of leading and consulting sales teams, this is the clearest difference I’ve seen. It separates the people who improve quickly from the people who stay roughly where they started.
It isn’t talent, and it isn’t hours. Some of the fastest developers I’ve worked with were not the hardest workers in the team by any measure you could put on a report. What they had was the willingness to work on something specific when nothing was forcing them to. Small, repeated, unwatched. Then an event arrives and they look like they’ve made a jump. They haven’t. They’ve been moving the whole time where nobody could see it.
It’s rarely who you’d guess
I got this wrong for years.
I used to read this off enthusiasm. The person who asked good questions in the team meeting, volunteered for things and was visibly keen was the one I’d back. That’s where I put the coaching time, the interesting accounts and the development budget. Sometimes I was right. Often enough I was backing someone who was energetic in front of me and never reviewed a call or prepared properly for one in between. Meanwhile somebody less noisy about it was getting steadily better on their own, and I hadn’t noticed, because they never made a thing of it.
Visible keenness is a personality trait. The willingness to develop when no one is looking is something else entirely, and the two live in the same person less often than you’d think.
Booking another event won’t fix it
The usual response, when a team isn’t developing, is to book something. A course, a workshop, a kick off with more energy behind it.
But that’s another event, and it hits the same wall. Two good days will show people what better looks like. They can’t do the work that gets anyone there, because that work happens on the Tuesdays afterwards, when the trainer has gone home.
The willingness on its own isn’t enough
The version of this argument you usually hear stops at wanting it badly enough. That lands as a telling off, and it isn’t much use to anybody.
Someone with real drive and nothing specific to work on will spend it on whatever’s nearest. Another sales book, a podcast on the commute, a webinar, an hour reading other people’s opinions on LinkedIn. That’s genuine effort going into general interest, and it moves them very little. Meanwhile the actual gap sits untouched for another year. It might be that they’ve never built a case a finance director would sign off, and no amount of reading is going to change that.
So it takes two things. The will to use the space, and something specific enough to aim at that using it pays off.
The third thing isn’t the individual’s at all
The first two belong to the person doing the work. The willingness is theirs, and so is the effort.
Whether either one ever appears in a team is a separate question. It has less to do with the people in it than most of us assume. It comes down to the conditions around them. Not a programme and not a policy, just ordinary conditions, which take longer to build and last longer once built. Four things seem to decide it.
What gets talked about. In a team where every one to one runs on pipeline, forecast and this month’s figures, everybody works out quickly what counts. Development becomes something that happens once a year in an appraisal. Ten minutes of a monthly one to one spent on what somebody is working on in themselves makes it a normal subject instead. That’s most of the job done.
What gets noticed. People repeat what gets recognised. Where the only thing ever called out is a closed deal, closing deals is the only behaviour with anything attached to it. Saying out loud that someone’s discovery has clearly improved, and that the work behind it shows, costs nothing at all. It changes what people do on a Tuesday.
Whether it’s safe to be bad at something. This one decides the other three. The first step in developing anything is admitting you can’t do it yet, and in plenty of sales teams that’s a risky thing to say. Where naming a weakness gets somebody moved off the good accounts, or remembered at review time, nobody names one. The unwatched work never starts, because the step before it never happens.
Whether the manager does it too. A manager who never visibly works on their own capability has already set the standard for everyone under them. It doesn’t need a performance. Admitting you’re not much good at something and have been reading up on it does more than any amount of encouragement.
None of it works without awareness
Nobody can work on a gap they can’t see, and most sellers genuinely don’t know what theirs are. Being told to be “more consultative” isn’t the same as knowing what to do differently on Tuesday morning.
That’s what the MyAcumen Team Diagnostic is built for. Everyone in a team is assessed against the same capabilities. Each person ends up with a specific, personal thing to work on, rather than a general instruction to improve. Alongside that it looks at what actually motivates them, and at the beliefs that stop people acting on what they already know.
The beliefs part matters more than it sounds. Plenty of people who look unwilling are nothing of the sort. Somewhere along the way they’ve decided they’re not the sort of person who talks to finance directors. So they don’t practise it, and the gap stays exactly where it is. That’s a belief doing the damage rather than a lack of drive, and the two need very different responses.
Once that’s in place a development budget changes shape. It stops being a course everybody attends and becomes fifteen people each working on the one thing that would move them. It’s also the point where it becomes possible to tell who’s using the space, because everyone knows what they were meant to be working on.
Where to start
The question works either way round.
If you run a team, pick three people and ask what they’ve worked on in the last month that nobody asked them to. Don’t make it a test, just ask, in a one to one, as a normal question. If you don’t run a team, ask it of yourself and answer it honestly.
Either way, listen for whether the answer is specific. “I’ve been reading a lot” is a very different answer from “I’ve been trying to get to the finance side earlier, because I keep losing on price.”
The second answer carries two things at once. That person is using the space, and they know what they’re using it on. When the answer doesn’t come at all, the useful question isn’t about willingness. It’s whether anybody has been handed something specific enough to work on, and whether anything in the ordinary week suggests the subject would be welcome.
Asking is the first move in both directions. It says the subject is worth raising, and that’s roughly where the conditions start.
If you want everyone in a team to have that one specific thing to work on, the MyAcumen Team Diagnostic is built for it: https://myacumen.online
If it’s your own gaps you want an honest read on, MyAcumen Complete does the same job for one person. And if you’d rather start smaller than either, the free Team Scorecard takes about four minutes.
