3 Habits of Successful Salespeople
Notes
What Are Some Habits of Successful Salespeople?
In this episode of The Slow Pitch, host Rob Jager discusses the three hidden sales habits of successful salespeople. These habits are highly effective for top performing, successful salespeople because they are simple to execute but important to the buyer. The odd part is they are often hidden in plain sight. Once you learn these highly effective sales habits and start to use them you’ll begin to have a different sales experience. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced pro, you’ll learn some core principles to improve your sales skills.
Most sales professionals are moving too fast—and it is costing them the deal.
In this episode, we break down three critical guardrails every salesperson needs to protect their margins, qualify for true commitment, and stop chasing prospects who are simply being polite. If you have ever handed over a price quote too early, misread a prospect’s enthusiasm, or felt like you were pulling the deal across the finish line alone, this breakdown reveals exactly why your process is stalling.
What we cover:
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The Diagnostic Mistake: The common blunder salespeople make in the first few minutes of a call that instantly kills their authority and destroys their pricing leverage.
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The Commitment Illusion: A simple psychological trap that causes professionals to mistake polite interest for a real deal—and the exact way to test your prospect’s true intentions.
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The Effort Imbalance: Why working harder than your prospect backfires, and how to shift the dynamic so they are the ones driving the deal forward.
Stop running a race you haven’t mapped out. Tune in, slow down, and discover how to control the conversation without pushing.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:21 Sales Habit 1
1:10 Sales Habit 2
2:39 Sales Habit 3
Keywords: Sales Tips, Sales Training, The Slow Pitch, Sales, Sales Podcast, Service Business, Close More Deals, Salesperson, Mistakes, How to Close Sales, Salesperson Habits, Successful Habits, Habits, Sales Habits, sales problems, sales help, sales training
Welcome to The Slow Pitch Sales Podcast
This is where business owners, sales professionals, and service providers come to sharpen their sales skills and close more deals. Each episode offers clear, no-fluff advice rooted in real-world sales experience and strong sales training principles. Whether you’re new to selling or a seasoned pro, you’ll learn how to ask better questions, uncover real buyer pain, and gain trust faster, while never using high-pressure tactics.
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Related Links:
Start Every Meeting Like This (Another Good Habit!)
7 Mistakes Every Salesperson Makes (at least once)
Sales Slump SOLVED! The 3 Lies Killing Your Close Rate
Watch this episode on The Slow Pitch YouTube Channel
The Episode
Rob Jager 00:00
Today we’re going to talk about the top three important tips every salesperson should know, and if you’re a beginner, these are going to be helpful. If you’re not a beginner, you’ve been around, maybe you forgot a few things. Let’s get into it.
Rob Jager 00:14
Alright, so this should be a reasonably quick episode, right? There’s only three tips here. It’s pretty simple.
Rob Jager 00:20
Number one, let’s slow down a little bit. Now, you would be surprised that I would come up with slow down on a slow pitch, right? Yeah, I understand. But here’s the thing: you need to slow down to make sure you can diagnose the problem before you start getting into numbers.
Rob Jager 00:34
Bad sales people give a quote within minutes of getting a phone call, or before they should, let’s put it that way, you don’t want to give a quote before it’s actually time. A really great salesperson will diagnose the problem correctly. That takes time.
Rob Jager 00:51
And by diagnose, that just means getting into the pain, getting to understanding what their problems really are, how much of an effort there is, how much of a problem there is, what the expense cost, what they’ve invested, all of the pieces, and diagnosing that before they actually get into what the actual pricing could be.
Rob Jager 01:09
Tip number two: don’t confuse interest with commitment. Just because they’re interested does not mean they’re committed at all. In fact, the way you find out commitment is you start asking some more questions about what kind of budget they have typically put forward for something like this in the past when they’ve worked on projects like this that are similar to this.
Rob Jager 01:30
How much did they invest in stuff like that? Was that more than they expected, less than they expected? Is that something that they’re expecting this time or not? How much time is involved on their end? What are they expecting time wise? How many other people are involved in this that should be involved, or you haven’t gotten them involved yet?
Rob Jager 01:46
And if you haven’t gotten all the decision makers involved, you need to do that, because you really don’t have a commitment until all the decision makers are involved in the process, and until they tell you what the next steps are, you’re probably not going to move forward until the next step that’s going to come down to almost all along the way, you saying something along the lines of what do we want to do next, that that phrase is going to be used a lot more frequently if you’re doing things correctly.
Rob Jager 02:11
It’s a way of checking for commitment. Another simple way of checking for commitment is, hey, on a scale of one to 1010, being really like, hey, I’m ready to move forward on this, and let’s sign right now to one. I have no interest in this whatsoever. Where do you, where do you feel like we’re at right now? Because I don’t feel like I’ve given you all the details, but I’m kind of curious where you are, and you’ll find out.
Rob Jager 02:32
Someone will say, well, I think it’s a five. Okay, interesting. You said five. Why is that? You start working through some of those kind of conversations. Tip number three is you need to match your efforts with their seriousness. If they’re serious, and all along the way they are telling you through their actions, through their words, through the things that they’re doing, doing is important.
Rob Jager 02:52
So, if they’re very serious, your effort should match. Now, when I say match, what I mean by that is your cadence, your pace, your feeling like you’re moving forward should be a little behind them.
Rob Jager 03:05
You should never get ahead of them and try to pull them over the finish line. You’re always going to want to try to let them pull you over the finish line. That’s critical, because when they pull you over, it’s become their decision, not yours.
Rob Jager 03:19
And that makes a difference in getting the sale completed someday in the future, we’re going to talk about what to do when it gets to that point of they’ve made the decision to buy and you’ve decided you’re going to let them buy. How you’re going to verify and confirm, because there’s a few more questions you need to be asking.
Rob Jager 03:35
We’ll get to that in the future, but if you found this episode to be helpful, like and subscribe, so you get more content just like this in the future, and remember, slow down and close more.