Throughout the world of sales training, coaching, and performance, you hear a lot about “top performers.” 

• We studied the success habits of several top performers...

• The three best practices of top performers...

• Top performers leverage XYZ... 

But is that all we should focus on in order to improve the results of our sales organizations as a whole? 

To be sure, having top performing salespeople on your team is certainly a big plus, and more is better. It seems so logical: start your sales improvement efforts by looking at what the top performers are doing. But too many organizations fall into that trap. Books, blogs, and methodologies are built around the idea that top performers do something different. More important, if non-top performers just did those same things, they also would be top performers. 

But does that even make sense? Let’s look at an analogy to try to understand the problem behind this kind of thinking. 

Imagine a professional hockey team. Professional hockey players all need to be good at many things, such as skating, puck handling, and trying to stay upright after being slammed into a wall. Some are better at some of those skills, and some are better at other skills. But are top performers doing these things while non-top performers are not? 

Of course not. All professional hockey players do ALL of these things. The key is HOW they do these things, how they combine the skills, and a plethora of other intangible qualities that matter—not just whether or not they do certain things or not. 

So, if we take a more rational and objective view, we can see the problem baked into the “we studied top performers” perspective.  For the “top performer” perspective to even begin to have any true utility, it needs to have at least three perspectives: 

• Top performers do some things that non-top performers do not. This is the most typical perspective trainers and managers apply to this kind of analysis. But in truth, this view is far from the whole story of why top performers succeed. This knowledge may be valuable, but not when the questions start and stop here. 

• Top performers and non-top performers do many of the same things. If this is true—as it is in the hockey analogy—then we can’t just look at what top performers do that non-top performers don’t. Instead, we also need to look at the qualitative side. Maybe everyone is doing the same things, but top performers are doing them qualitatively better. 

• Non-top performers do some things that top performers do not. It is not enough to look at top performers to see what is there, you have to look at all performers and see what works and what does not. Just because you try to add the “magic” that top performers do, doesn’t mean that non-top performers will be successful by adding those things. Why? Because non-top performers are likely doing some things that HURT them—behaviors that need to be eliminated before performance can improve. 

Where does this leave us? 

Sales improvement efforts that simply examine top performers to identify behaviors all salespeople should model leave a lot of unanswered questions. To properly improve an entire sales force, you need to take a holistic approach to what works for all levels of salespeople. You need to not only incorporate best practice behaviors, but also eliminate problematic habits in order to achieve improvement across the board. 

So, the next time someone tells you that they studied top performers in order to unlock the secrets of sales success, remember that this approach is far from telling the whole story.