Get ahead of 99% of salespeople, it's simpler than you think

Getting ahead of 99% of salespeople is simpler than you think. Most people overcomplicate this stuff in their mind just to justify why they're not there yet. I've closed $9M+ in sales in my career and trained hundreds of students to hit 10, 20, 30k plus a month. Here's the exact framework, no fluff.

Three things. What, who, how. That's it. Let me break down each one.

What do you actually want

If you don't know what you want, you don't have an aim. And success is a very small target. If you don't know where you're aiming, you're not going to accidentally hit it.

Sales is the closest thing to sports in business. The ball goes in the net or it doesn't. You make the sale or you don't. So if you want to be top 1% in your position, you need to look at what the top 1% is actually making and get clear on that number for yourself.

My first number was $15,000 a month. But the number isn't the important part.

The why is so much more important than the what.

If you're having sales conversations, the biggest thing you need to do is get to people's why. You're going to have a hard time doing that if you can't get to your own why first.

Write down your ideal lifestyle. What car do you want. Mine was an Aston Martin. What about family, vacations, a house. It has to mean something to you.

Here's a trick if your vision feels fuzzy. I didn't have a clear vision of what I was running toward at first, but I had a very clear vision of what I was running away from. Growing up in Kansas, one of six kids in a single mother household, there were two things I refused to be: average, and restricted.

So I inverted them. To not be average, I had to be extraordinary. To not feel restricted, I had to be free. That's what led me to the $15k number. Figure out the emotion you're running from, flip it, and build your number around that.

Who you need to become

Once you know the what, you need to figure out who you have to be to get there. This breaks into two things: identity and skill set.

Start with an audit. Not your best day, not your worst day. Who are you on a day to day basis. Write down five strengths and five weaknesses.

For me, my strength was connecting with people easily. My biggest weakness was complacency. I was skilled but didn't always put in the work.

Once you know your current strengths and weaknesses, write out the strengths the person making your number would have. Then figure out what you need to let go of. For me that was complacency. If I held onto it, there was no way I was getting what I wanted.

Here's why this matters in sales specifically:

You are helping people change. You are leading them to a better outcome. But if you can't lead yourself, you're going to have a hard time leading other people.

That's where conviction comes from. And conviction is the one thing no sales training can give you. You only get it by doing the work.

A big part of building conviction is killing your own limiting beliefs. When I review calls, the two biggest issues I see are reps letting limiting beliefs go by unchallenged, or not having the conviction to overcome them. If you're telling yourself you don't have money to invest in yourself, and a prospect says the same thing to you, how are you going to help them move past it?

Write your limiting beliefs down. Ask if they're actually true or just a story you've been telling yourself. 99% of the time it's a story. Once you can spot that in yourself, you start spotting it in prospects. That's literally how I got good at handling objections. I had to convince myself first.

Show up right on every call

How you show up shapes how the call goes. This is state management, and it matters because sales is the closest thing to being an athlete.

One thing I used to do when things were tight, money problems, tough situations, was play out the worst case scenario in my head and shrink it down. When I first moved to Miami and wasn't making what I needed, I'd think through it: worst case, I break my lease and move back to Kansas with my dad. That's really not that bad.

That let me show up on calls without needing the sale. Need repels people. You can say the exact same words with the same tone, but if you need the sale underneath it, it leaks out in your mannerisms. People pick up on it.

I also listen back to calls where I killed it. Not just the calls that went bad. Most people in self improvement only focus on what needs fixing. If you never acknowledge what you did well, it chips away at your confidence.

Visualization helped too. Every night before bed, I'd look at my calendar and visualize every conversation for the next day going perfectly, credit card in hand. Then I'd go back through the previous day's calls that didn't go my way and mentally rewrite them as wins.

In my mind, I always close 100%. So it's going to be hard to etch at my confidence.

Build the actual skill set

Identity alone doesn't close deals. You need the skill too. Four things to focus on:

• Questions
• Tone
• Objection prevention
• Objection handling

Get those four down and you'll be dangerous on calls. That's the who, covered on both sides, identity and skill.

How you actually get it done

Now that you know what you want and who you need to be, the last piece is how. This comes down to opportunity, and opportunity has two parts: getting the right offer, and leveraging it once you're in.

Finding the offer. If you're newer, start as a setter to get reps in before jumping to closer. If you've got experience, go for closing roles directly. There are four ways I've landed every job I've had:

• Cold outreach. This is how I got my job with Scaling With Systems. I found the owner's email and sent it directly. When you reach out, bring value. For me that's a strong call recording. If you don't have one, get one. A recorded call where you crushed it is worth more than any resume line.
• Job boards. Most are garbage. I've never found a good position from a sales Facebook group. LinkedIn is the one that's worked. More competition, but more established companies. The first high ticket job I landed, with Stock Navigators, came from LinkedIn three days after the post went up, way after they'd already started interviews. I messaged the sales manager directly, sent over call recordings, and they hired me on the spot without even doing a mock call.
• Recruiters. Most are garbage too. Not because they're bad people, they just don't have access to good positions. If you find a good one, great, but don't count on it.
• Network. This is the slowest but strongest. Every job I've gotten through my network came from relationships I'd built for six months or more, where I gave value first. Roleplaying with people in a training group, coaching someone for free, helping someone else land a job. Don't network just to extract. People reaching out asking to "pick my brain" with nothing to offer get ignored, every time.

Leverage. Once you've got the offer, leverage is just how many sales you can close in the time you're given. Two inputs: skill and activity.

Skill is something you do, not something you did once. Let it sit and it atrophies, same as anything else. Keep a roleplay partner, keep listening to your own calls.

Activity is the one people avoid talking about because it's less fun than objection handling. But the math is simple.

Even if you're closing at 10%, if you talk to 10 times as many people, you'll make 10 times the sales.

Most reps waste this without noticing. Say you've got 10 hours blocked for calls, but 4 no shows happen and you do nothing with that open time. Now you're working 6 hours, not 10. Build a process for every no show: call back previous no shows, call people who didn't buy, call past clients for upsells or referrals. Keep those hours full.

Activity moves faster than skill. Both matter, don't let anyone tell you one beats the other, but if you need sales now, activity is your lever.

The bottom line

Top 1% isn't a mystery. Know your what and the why underneath it. Build the who through honest self audit, killing limiting beliefs, and keeping your state right. Then execute the how: find the right offer through outreach that leads with value, and stack leverage through skill plus relentless activity. Nothing here is complicated. It's just rarely done.