Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently

Chapter 8Profile of the Insight Seller

Skills, Knowledge, and Attributes

What It Takes to Perform

As of the writing of this book, Andrew Bynum had just been released from the Cleveland Cavaliers. At one point Bynum was an NBA star, rivaled at the center position by only Dwight Howard. Still, at 26 years old, he’s having trouble finding a team that will take a chance on him. Why?

“He doesn’t want to play basketball anymore,”¹ a league source told well-connected Yahoo! Sports writers Adrian Wojnarowski and Marc J. Spears. The source also said of Bynum, “He never liked it that much in the first place.”

Most of Insight Selling has been about helping sellers know what to do to succeed. People ask us all the time if we can train anyone to sell. The answer is we can train anyone, and to some extent everyone can learn, but that doesn’t mean he or she will succeed. Just because people can do something doesn’t mean they want to do it (ahem, Bynum) or even will do it.

When what to do, can do, and will do come together, then you have yourself someone likely to perform at a high level.

Process and method (what to do) + skills and knowledge (can do) + attributes (will do and how well) = performance

Organizations that want to make insight selling a part of their culture (and sellers who want to strengthen their own insight selling chops) need to know the mix of skills, knowledge, and attributes that make up a model insight seller: the person most capable and inclined to do what insight ...