So many people think of “closing a deal” as this pressure cooker moment, putting on the heat, or some strong arm tactics to win a project. But the truth is, it’s an almost surgical effort to find the little obstacles to customers making a decision on the path to victory.

Many salespeople who are early in their career have aspirations to grow into the leadership ranks one day. I know I did. Part of this was driven from looking up to my Dad who was a salesperson turned sales leader, and part was by observing a few people that I looked up to that were in leadership roles.

How do you measure the performance of a salesperson? That’s a pretty easy question to answer… how much business do they bring in. It’s the ultimate measure. In today’s age of sales technology, there is an endless number of data points that we can pay attention to. The challenge when we can measure anything, is that we try to measure everything and then we get lost in data.