‘Skillent’ should be the Goal of every Home Improvement Salesman.

‘Skillent’ is a word I coined to help make an important point about attitude and my approach to training. I define ‘skillent’ as a skill that has been practiced or perfected to such a level that it appears to be a natural, God-given talent.

When you accept ‘skillent’ as your professional goal, you are freed from self-imposed limitations which are often the most crippling kind.

Talent is what you were born with. While your talent may be great, it’s always limited. No amount of will or determination can alter it. Skill is what you gain by training or experience and it is essentially unlimited, it’s growth shaped by your decisions. ‘Skillent’ is the combination of the two and as skill becomes the greater component, the more it resembles talent.

The concept of ‘skillent’ can be especially liberating in a field like athletics or straight commission selling where a few bad games or missed sales can make you wonder if you’ve really got the stuff to be a champion. Hit a slump and you could come to believe that your success will be forever bridled by the limits of your natural gifts. Fact is, talent is only a starting point. Over time, it’s ‘skillent’ that makes the champion.

Consider this:

Tiger Woods is recognized as the best putter in golf. But he wasn’t born with a putter in his hand. There was once a time when his putting was worse than mine. (Come to think of it, maybe not.) But in the years since that time, he’s taken a few million putts that I haven’t taken. It’s said that every day, before he takes off his spikes, Tiger Woods sinks 100 putts in a row. If he misses the 99th, he starts over. That kind of discipline is not a gift from God but an expression of will, a decision anyone can chose to make.
Michael Jordan is the best basketball player ever to play the game. Yet in the ninth grade, he lacked the talent to play for his high school basketball team. His natural talent was less than extraordinary, but his ultimate skillent was unmatched.

No doubt, as a boy, he recognized that others could run faster and jump higher, but at some point, the young Laney High School student determined that no one was going to work harder or practice smarter. From that moment up until his retirement, he practiced 500 jump shots every single day.

A young player watching Jordan’s seemly effortless excellence might shrug and accept that he simply lacks the ‘talent’ to perform at Jordan’s level. On the other hand, the young player who understands ‘skillent’, watches the master and is energized. He knows that Jordan’s performance level is attainable – though it may take 800 practice shots a day. (To hear that message in Michael’s own words, go to nike.com/jumpman23 and click on Jordan TV.)

Of course, Larry Bird was, by any objective standard, one of the least ‘talented’ players to step onto an NBA court, yet he ranks among the fifty best in ‘skillent’. How fortunate for the Celtics he never accepted his limited talent as an excuse for less than excellent performance.

Skillent in Home Improvement Selling

As I travel the country, speaking to home improvement salesmen, I’m usually introduced as “The 91% Guy– the guy who closed nine out of ten leads a week for 72 weeks with a 6% rescission rate.” It’s a tough introduction to follow. The initial reaction from the sales force is always, “No Way.” But by the time I leave, most of the salesmen believe such a performance level is possible and they understand how I did it. Unfortunately, far too many will set their personal goals well below that standard. They’ll settle for a ten or fifteen percent increase in close rate, shrug and say, “That’s good for me. I just don’t have Rodney’s talent .”

Nonsense.

In the sales business, qualities like ‘charisma’ and communications ability may add up to what is described as ‘a talent for sales’, but I’ve seen again and again with candidates of modest talent that the pivotal skills are as teachable as a foul shot and, like the foul shot, are refined through endless repetition. In screening sales candidates, I’ve found that a willingness to learn and a determination to master the skills is more important than natural sales ability.

If it’s repeatable, it’s perfectible.

Here are four tips to help develop skillent.

• First: Structure. Establish a disciplined process and a structured presentation. I teach a ten-step process I call SuperStar Selling™. It moves through the same distinct phases whatever the product, whatever the objections. There’s plenty of room for improvisation and spontaneity but always within the disciplined structure.

• Second: ‘Practice the way you play’. In this business, the equivalent of Jordan’s practice shots is role-play. I recommend three sales meetings a week with individual salesmen role-playing in front of a group that knows the presentation verbatim. The pressure of performing your presentation in front of your peers will reveal weaknesses that might never become apparent to you at the kitchen table.

• Third: Refining your game. With a disciplined structure in place, the sales manager can act as coach, diagnosing the problems his salesmen are meeting and focusing his training meetings on the weakest elements in the presentation. As new objections emerge in the field, these can be explored in sales meeting role-play.

• Four: Watch the game films. Just as game films are a powerful diagnostic tool for the athlete, a video of his performance in a role-play setting is often the best way for a sales rep to recognize mistakes. While it’s sometimes painful to see your mistakes in front of others, recognizing your mistakes– and theirs– raises the ‘skillent’ of the entire sales force.

There are many elements to an effective training program but the most important is an understanding that, in the end, ‘skillent’ is all that matters and your ‘skillent’ is your choice.