What is Grit?

Thinking of some of successful people, one of the greatest attributes they hold is grit. It's an odd term and not main stream in most talk paths, more studies have come out on how grit contributes to over achievement.

I pulled this off Wikipedia as a reference and it has some interesting definitions, links and empirical data.

If you DISC or personality test your candidates, perhaps a "Grit" test would be a better gauge of future success, especially in sales.

Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait, based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective. This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles or challenges that lie within a gritty individual’s path to accomplishment and serves as a driving force in achievement realization. Commonly associated concepts within the field of psychology include "perseverance," "hardiness," "resilience,” “ambition,” “need for achievement” and conscientiousness. These constructs can be conceptualized as individual differences related to the accomplishment of work rather than latent ability.This distinction was brought into focus in 1907 when William James challenged the field to further investigate how certain individuals are capable of accessing richer trait reservoirs enabling them to accomplish more than the average person,^[1] but the construct dates back at least to Galton, and the ideals of persistence and tenacity have been understood as a virtue at least since Aristotle. Although the last decade has seen a noticeable increase in research focused on achievement-oriented traits, there continues to be difficulty in aligning specific traits and outcomes.

Definition of Grit

Grit is defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” ^[2] Building upon biographical collections of famous leaders in history, researchers and scientists have reached similar conclusions about high achieving individuals. Specifically, those individuals who were deemed more successful and influential than their contemporary counterparts typically possessed traits above and beyond that of normal ability.^[3][4][5] While ability was still critically important, these individuals also possessed “zeal” and “persistence of motive and effort.”^[2] Duckworth and colleagues (2007) believe this dual-component of Grit to be a crucial differentiator from similar constructs. Grit is conceptualized as a stable trait that does not require immediate positive feedback.^[2] Individuals high in Grit are able to maintain their determination and motivation over long periods of time despite experiences with failure and adversity. Their passion and commitment towards the long-term objective is the overriding factor that provides the stamina required to “stay the course” amid challenges and set-backs. Essentially, the Grittier person is focused on winning the marathon, not the sprint.

Literature Comparisons

Grit and Positive Psychology

Grit also ties in with positive psychology and in particular, with perseverance. As mentioned earlier, the ability to stick with and pursue a goal over a long period of time is an important aspect of Grit. This area of positive psychology has been interested in the process of perseverance as a positive indicator of long term success.^[6] Grit’s inclusion of the perseverance construct is perhaps unsurprising as Angela Duckworth was a doctoral candidate under Martin Seligman.

Grit and Intelligence

One of the best predictors of future achievement has been intelligence.^[7] This relationship has been found in scholastic achievement as well as in job performance.^[8] As such, one might expect that grit would be strongly correlated with intelligence. In fact, this prompted one of the early questions asked in Grit research, “Why do some individuals accomplish more than others of equal intelligence?”.^[2] Somewhat surprisingly, in four separate samples, Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence.^[9] This means that Grit, unlike many traditional measures of performance is not tied to intelligence. As the researchers have suggested, this helps explain why some very intelligent individuals do not consistently perform well over long periods of time.

[edit] Grit and Personality Measures

The Grit measure has been compared to the Big Five personality model, which are a group of broad personality dimensions consisting of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.^[10] In one study by Duckworth and Quinn, the Short Grit Scale (Grit–S) and 12-item self-report measure of Grit (Grit–O) measuring Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals.^[2] This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit distinct from conscientiousness. Another personality characteristic that is often linked to Grit is the need for achievement. One way in which Grit differs from the need for achievement is that individuals with high scores in Grit often set extremely long-term goals for themselves and pursue them deliberately even without positive feedback,^[2] while need for achievement lacks this long-term component.

Comparison with related psychological constructs

Traditional constructs in this area include perseverance, hardiness, resilience, ambition, and need for achievement. Grit has been argued to be distinguishable from each of these in the following ways. Perseverance is the steadfast pursuit of a task, mission, or journey in spite of obstacles, discouragement, or distraction. In contrast, Grit is argued to be trait to perseverance. Grit enables an individual to persevere in accomplishing a goal despite obstacles over an extended period of time.^[2] When compared with the construct of persistence, Grit adds a component of passion for the goal.^[11] This goal passion also contributes to the ability of the individual to sustain effort over the long term.

Maddi (2006) defines hardiness as a combination of attitudes that provide the courage and motivation to do the hard, strategic work of turning stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities.^[12] While Grit is primarily a measure of an individual’s ability to persist in obtaining a specific goal over an extended time period (Duckworth et al., 2007), hardiness refers to an individual’s ability to persist through difficult circumstances and does not address the individual’s long term persistence toward a specific goal.^[2] Maddi (2006) developed a theoretical model of hardiness as a tool for developing resilience.^[12]

Resilience is a dynamic process in which an individual overcomes significant adversity, usually in the form of a life changing event or difficult personal circumstances. Resilience can be conceptualized as an adaptive response to a challenging situation.^[13] Grit involves maintaining goal focused effort for extended periods of time, often while facing adversity but does not require a critical incident. Importantly, Grit is conceptualized as a trait while resilience is a dynamic process. Finally, resilience has been almost exclusively studied in children (cf. Luther, Doernberger, & Zigler, 1993) who are born into “at-risk” situations.^[13] Although resilience researchers recognize that adults likely demonstrate resilience in a similar manner to children, the resilience process has not been studied in a mature population.^[14]

Ambition is broadly defined as the desire for attainment, power, or superiority. In contrast to ambitious individuals, Gritty individuals do not seek fame or external recognition for their achievements. Ambition is often associated with a desire for fame.^[15] Unlike ambitious individuals, gritty individuals do not seek to distinguish themselves from other people, but to obtain personal goals.

McClelland (1961) describes need for achievement as a drive to complete manageable goals that enable the individual to receive immediate feedback.^[16] In contrast to need for achievement, Gritty individuals consciously set long-term goals that are difficult to attain and do not waver from these difficult goals, regardless of the presence of feedback. Additionally, need for achievement has been studied for almost 50 years and has been found to positively correlate to self-efficacy and learning goal orientation.^[17][18] These links have not yet been tested in the Grit literature.

Scientific Findings

The primary scientific findings on Grit come from Duckworth and colleagues’ examination of Grit as an individual difference trait capable of predicting long-term success.^[2] It was proposed that individuals who possess a drive to tirelessly work through challenges, failures, and adversity to achieve set goals and are uniquely positioned to reach higher achievements than others who lack similar stamina. In a series of six studies Duckworth et al. proposed, developed, and tested a two-factor Grit scale with notable results. In addition to validating their Grit scale, the authors also found support suggesting that Grit provided incremental predictive validity for education and age above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits (Study 2); that higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p < .01; Study 3); that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy (Study 4); and that participants in a National Spelling Bee with higher Grit scores typically work harder and longer than less Gritty peers, ultimately resulting in better performance. This series of studies provides empirical evidence that an individual difference conceptualized as Grit can account for significant variance in performance across a variety of settings. Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

In 2009, Duckworth and Quinn found additional support for the Grit construct when they developed and validated a more condensed version of the Grit Scale (Grit-S) by removing four of the previous items and improving its psychometric properties. Using samples from the data collected in their 2007 studies, the authors were able to achieve complementary results that suggested the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition.

Future Directions

Questions may surface relating to what additional cognitive and non-cognitive traits play complementary roles in the development of Grit. Of additional interest may be how the distinctive environmental conditions, specifically the interrelationships of emotional and cognitive load, might moderate and assist in explaining why some individuals succumb to significant challenges or struggle with obstacles that block their path to goal achievement, while others are able to overcome these barriers. The United States military believes that this and similar constructs may assist in explaining why some soldiers are better equipped to handle the psychological trauma of combat.^[19] Other on-going work includes investigations of the combined or multiplicative impacts of both cognitive and Grit-like predictors of achievement in leader adaptability situations.^[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)

5 Sales Tips to Recharge During the Lazy Days of Summer

Many people accept that a slowdown in sales  is a fact of business life during the lazy days of summer. Well, nothing could be further from the truth, and as a business owner you need to get out of that frame of mind.

A summer slowdown may be something many people want because they expect this to be a season for vacations when the living is easy. But you don't have to accept that. When others go to sleep, you need to wake up. If you follow these tips, you can create opportunity for your small business while others are off to the beach.

1. Make a firm decision not to participate in a slowdown. Don't allow your employees to buy into this thinking because I assure you that they will make a summer slowdown one of the first excuses if there are any issues with their job performance. Hold a daily meeting to discuss what you are going to do to prosper--not contract—this summer. Set clearly defined goals and list the activities that need to be undertaken to achieve them. Give yourself deadlines for your goals and create a no excuses, no negativity environment. You'll be surprised by what you can achieve.

2. Work your power base. Get out in front of the summer slowdown and let your best customers know you'll be available all summer. Target anyone who has bought from you in the last 90 days through direct mail, phone calls, emails or social media. Get into regular communication with these customers and figure out how to expand your business with them. For example, find out what you can do to assist as they prepare for vacation or to help fill a gap in their absence.

3. Target busy customers who can't take a long vacation. Focus some of your marketing efforts on prospective customers who plan to be around in July and August. Remember that these are clearly busy people who are pressed for time and can't afford a vacation or leisurely summer work pace. Take the initiative by distributing flyers, getting on social media and updating your website to let people know you will be around, too, and can offer something valuable to help them deal with their time constraints. For example, if you're an auto dealer, take that new convertible by the customer's office and let your prospective buyer test drive the car and sign the paperwork there. Or if you're a lunchbox delivery service, let prospects know you can provide food so they don't have to leave their comfortable, air-conditioned offices.

4. Offer a value-added proposition to avoid discounting prices. You will probably need to make even more profit from each sale to compensate for decreased summertime volume. So, figure out creative ways to repackage your products or services to provide something extra, such as a special summer-themed promotion. For example, I took two of my lectures series and packaged them into a Fourth of July special. The value-added proposition: When taken together, the lectures are both more informative and effective.

5. Service is senior to selling and needs to be top of mind. Service should be a year-around commitment, of course, but it is even more important during a summer slowdown when your competitors go into that "living is easy" mode and take their eye off the ball. Show that you are motivated to make things happen quickly and empower employees to accommodate special requests, even if it means opening your business early or letting customers enter your establishment in flip flops or beachwear. This is your chance to shine and make a lasting impression. After all, your goal is to make sure your new business keeps coming back to you long after summer is over.

Source

http://www.frontrow-solutions.com/ and http://www.entrepreneur.com/sales/index.html

5 Traits of Highly Successful Salesmen

By Geoffrey James  of INC Magazine

Are you cut out to make the sale? Make sure you've got these characteristics--or else learn to develop them.

Selling and buying are not purely intellectual exercises. Buyers and sellers are emotional human beings, which is why great salespeople are always masters at managing their own emotions. Based upon my observation (and some pretty hefty research in emotional intelligence), highly successful salespeople cultivate the following five emotional traits:

1. Assertiveness

This allows you to move a sales situation forward without offending or frustrating the customer. Think of it as being located halfway between passivity and aggressiveness. For example, suppose a customer is delaying a decision. There are at least three basic responses:

Passive: "Could you give me a call when you've made a decision?"

Aggressive: "If you don't buy right now, the offer is off the table."

Assertive: "Can you give me a specific time and date when you'll make your final decision?"

The passive response puts the sale on hold indefinitely (or give your competitor the opening to outsell you). The aggressive response creates pressure and resentment: Even if it works, you'll be seen as a typical pushy salesman. The assertive approach sets up the specific conditions for the close, without forcing the customer's pace.

2. Self-Awareness

You need to be able to identify your own emotions, understand how they work, and then use them to help you build stronger customer relationships. This is a four-step process:

Identify the emotions that you're feeling,

Based on experience, predict how those emotions will affect your sales effort.

Compensate for negative emotions that might hinder the sale.

Expand your positive emotions that might help you make the sale.

For example, suppose you feel furious that an important customer stood you up. You might take a break before your next meeting in order to remind yourself of all the times you've succeeded in the face of challenges. Or you might, as an ice-breaker, tell your second customer that you're having a tough day and why.

3. Empathy

This entails adapting your behavior to the customer's moods and emotions. It begins with listening and observing, but simply knowing what the customer might be feeling is not enough. You must be able to feel what the customer is likely to be feeling.

Suppose, during a sales call, you discover that the customer's firm just announced major layoffs. You could ignore the news and proceed with the sales call as if nothing had changed, or you could focus on your own desire to make the sale and ask your contact who will have buying authority after the layoffs are over.

Both responses to the event make business sense–but if you want to build a better relationship, you'll be empathetic and imagine your contact's sense of fear and confusion. Then, depending on your emotional reading of the customer, decide whether the customer would prefer to commiserate, complain or (alternatively) be distracted from the situation.

4. Problem Solving

The desire to solve a problem helps you create new ways to satisfy the customer's needs, both financial (the ROI of your offering) and emotional–such as the customer's need to be convinced that your and your firm are reputable and reliable. Problem solving is a four step process:

See the customer situation as it really is. (Never try to solve a problem before you fully understand it.)

Help the customer visualize a more desirable situation.

Devise a way to move the customer from the ways things are today to the way the customer would like them to be.

Communicate that solution in a way that makes it easy for the customer to make a decision.

While those steps might seem obvious, they're the exact opposite of old-school salesmanship, where selling entails "giving a great sales pitch."

5. Optimism

Optimism helps you maintain a sense of balance when things go awry. It proceeds directly from the (often unspoken) rules that you use to interpret daily events. For example, if the first sales call of the day goes poorly, your performance for the rest of the day will be different if you have this rule...

A bad first call means that I'm off my game this will be a bad day.
... rather than this rule:

Every sales call is different, so the next will probably be better.
Note that both rules are arbitrary responses to the same event, and neither is more "realistic" than the other. Even so, if you automatically jump to the first rule, rather than the second, it will be difficult for you to remain happy.

This principle works on bigger events, too. I've run into about a dozen top salespeople who saw the weak economy as an opportunity to sell even more,and did so, while their colleagues were busy hand-wringing.

Team Building in 2012

It's a new year and for many organizations it's time to shake up your team building exercises. Push people outside of their comfort zone, give them an experience they will talk about for the rest of their lives, challenge them mentally,physically - let them find new boundaries to their resiliency.

Thinking this might be what your team needs? Check out Warrior Dash. MUD. SWEAT. BEER.

Races across the United States, Canada, Ireland, England and Australia.

Watch the video and decide if your team has what it takes to be a warrior.

The High Cost of Sales Team Turnover

BY Katherine Graham-Leviss


Even during a time of high unemployment, top salespeople are always in demand, and their skills are easily portable from one sales environment to the next. Losing them to a higher bidder or a more lucrative sales opportunity is too easy to be taken lightly.

The cost of hiring a new employee for any position is significant, whether an employee is fired or laid off or leaves voluntarily. The many formulas that calculate such costs vary widely, but can range upward of 200 percent of an employee's annual salary. That includes not only the obvious tangible costs of severance pay, vacation accrual, and job advertising and recruiting fees, but also indirect costs such as the staff time needed for paperwork, recruiting, resume reviews and interviews, and then new-hire orientation and training. Other hard to quantify costs can include customer dissatisfaction, poor employee morale and loss of revenue during transitions.

Let's assume the average salary in a given company is $50,000 per year. If the cost of turnover is 150 percent of salary, then the cost would be $75,000 per departing employee. For a company of 100 employees with a 10 percent annual rate of turnover, the annual cost of turnover would be an estimated $750,000.

Once you realize what it's costing, in both dollars and people assets, you'll want to seriously consider how to reduce your turnover rate. A first step for reducing turnover is understanding your turnover numbers and issues. Start by answering these four questions.

What is your year-over-year average turnover rate?

Can you tie significant changes in the rate to the workplace's physical environment?

What is your turnover rate compared to your competition?

Are there times during the year when people leave more frequently?

Answering these questions will help you to begin to understand some aspects of turnover within your sales force and you can start to find ways to reduce turnover in your organization.

Another important knowledge-gathering step is to conduct exit interviews and ask why your salespeople leave. While it can be difficult to get candid answers -- employees often realize there's nothing to be gained by saying anything negative -- asking exiting employees to rate factors on a scale of 1 to 5 can point to the problems in a more objective and equally productive manner. You can ask them, for example, to rate the level of sales support, management support, fairness of sales goals and fairness of compensation. Design your questions to determine whether you are creating an environment that salespeople can thrive in.

If you find those leaving feel that sales quotas are unattainable, that they can't live on their compensation between sales, or that they simply think they can make more money someplace else, you'll have a better understanding of what you can do to change the environment.

A great deal of employee turnover can be attributed to mistakes made during the hiring process. The problem lies in the employee selection process. Simply put, when you hire people for the wrong job, they leave.

Tere are hiring practices you can implement that will help reduce your turnover and increase retention of your best people. Here are a few:

Make attracting high-performers part of your ongoing business practices so you are always "hire ready."

Define your hiring criteria, including the job description, so that you hire the right people for the job.

Learn how to screen resumes for top performers.

Give your hiring managers the skills they need to do the job right.

Gather the right kind of data to ensure your candidates have the requisite skills.

Create a consistent and thorough interview and selection process.

Hire salespeople by looking at three areas: experience, technical skills, and communication skills and problem-solving skills.

Too often hiring managers glean valuable insights into employee preferences, strengths and weaknesses during the hiring process and then fail to use the information as a resource to help develop and retain the employee. So rather than focusing exclusively on hiring, you should also begin to think about how to develop sales staff immediately. All that you learn during hiring can be used to continually improve the job-person fit.

Creating a development plan for your salespeople helps show them what they can do to grow and develop, to advance, to become more valued, and to be more satisfied in their work. Development plans also point out what kind of support and assistance they will need to get where they are going faster.

You and your employee will work on the development plan together, but the more involved the employee is in determining the areas to work on, the more committed that individual will be to accomplishing the goals. The objective is to create an environment that encourages continuing feedback from managers, which will help employees advance more quickly, achieve more, avoid unnecessary problems and setbacks -- and stay with your company.

Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople

By: Steve Martin

If you ask an extremely successful salesperson, "What makes you different from the average sales rep?" you will most likely get a less-than-accurate answer, if any answer at all. Frankly, the person may not even know the real answer because most successful salespeople are simply doing what comes naturally.

Over the past decade, I have had the privilege of interviewing thousands of top business-to-business salespeople who sell for some of the world's leading companies. I've also administered personality tests to 1,000 of them. My goal was to measure their five main personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and negative emotionality) to better understand the characteristics that separate them their peers.

The personality tests were given to high technology and business services salespeople as part of sales strategy workshops I was conducting. In addition, tests were administered at Presidents Club meetings (the incentive trip that top salespeople are awarded by their company for their outstanding performance). The responses were then categorized by percentage of annual quota attainment and classified into top performers, average performers, and below average performers categories.

The test results from top performers were then compared against average and below average performers. The findings indicate that key personality traits directly influence top performers' selling style and ultimately their success. Below, you will find the main key personality attributes of top salespeople and the impact of the trait on their selling style.

1. Modesty. Contrary to conventional stereotypes that successful salespeople are pushy and egotistical, 91 percent of top salespeople had medium to high scores of modesty and humility. Furthermore, the results suggest that ostentatious salespeople who are full of bravado alienate far more customers than they win over.

Selling Style Impact: Team Orientation. As opposed to establishing themselves as the focal point of the purchase decision, top salespeople position the team (presales technical engineers, consulting, and management) that will help them win the account as the centerpiece.

2. Conscientiousness. Eighty-five percent of top salespeople had high levels of conscientiousness, whereby they could be described as having a strong sense of duty and being responsible and reliable. These salespeople take their jobs very seriously and feel deeply responsible for the results.

Selling Style Impact: Account Control. The worst position for salespeople to be in is to have relinquished account control and to be operating at the direction of the customer, or worse yet, a competitor. Conversely, top salespeople take command of the sales cycle process in order to control their own destiny.

3. Achievement Orientation. Eighty-four percent of the top performers tested scored very high in achievement orientation. They are fixated on achieving goals and continuously measure their performance in comparison to their goals.

Selling Style Impact: Political Orientation. During sales cycles, top sales, performers seek to understand the politics of customer decision-making. Their goal orientation instinctively drives them to meet with key decision-makers. Therefore, they strategize about the people they are selling to and how the products they're selling fit into the organization instead of focusing on the functionality of the products themselves.

4. Curiosity. Curiosity can be described as a person's hunger for knowledge and information. Eighty-two percent of top salespeople scored extremely high curiosity levels. Top salespeople are naturally more curious than their lesser performing counterparts.

Selling Style Impact: Inquisitiveness. A high level of inquisitiveness correlates to an active presence during sales calls. An active presence drives the salesperson to ask customers difficult and uncomfortable questions in order to close gaps in information. Top salespeople want to know if they can win the business, and they want to know the truth as soon as possible.

5. Lack of Gregariousness. One of the most surprising differences between top salespeople and those ranking in the bottom one-third of performance is their level of gregariousness (preference for being with people and friendliness). Overall, top performers averaged 30 percent lower gregariousness than below average performers.

Selling Style Impact: Dominance. Dominance is the ability to gain the willing obedience of customers such that the salesperson's recommendations and advice are followed. The results indicate that overly friendly salespeople are too close to their customers and have difficulty establishing dominance.

6. Lack of Discouragement. Less than 10 percent of top salespeople were classified as having high levels of discouragement and being frequently overwhelmed with sadness. Conversely, 90 percent were categorized as experiencing infrequent or only occasional sadness.

Selling Style Impact: Competitiveness. In casual surveys I have conducted throughout the years, I have found that a very high percentage of top performers played organized sports in high school. There seems to be a correlation between sports and sales success as top performers are able to handle emotional disappointments, bounce back from losses, and mentally prepare themselves for the next opportunity to compete.

7. Lack of Self-Consciousness. Self-consciousness is the measurement of how easily someone is embarrassed. The byproduct of a high level of self-consciousness is bashfulness and inhibition. Less than five percent of top performers had high levels of self-consciousness.

Selling Style Impact: Aggressiveness. Top salespeople are comfortable fighting for their cause and are not afraid of rankling customers in the process. They are action-oriented and unafraid to call high in their accounts or courageously cold call new prospects.

Not all salespeople are successful. Given the same sales tools, level of education, and propensity to work, why do some salespeople succeed where others fail? Is one better suited to sell the product because of his or her background? Is one more charming or just luckier? The evidence suggests that the personalities of these truly great salespeople play a critical role in determining their success.