Top Performers Don't Hustle As Hard As You Think

"It's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll."

Nothing worth achieving comes without hard work, and a career in sales is no different from AC/DC's 1975 classic about a band paying their dues in order to make it to the big time. It's not a 9-5 job. You don't get paid for your time, you get paid for your results, and a lot of times, that means working more hours. It's easy to imagine that the best-performing salespeople just outwork their peers.

I'm here to tell you that's not true. In a lot of cases, they actually work less.

How's that possible? It comes down to a combination of deep work, passion, and alignment. Let me demonstrate...

Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino have each written two bonafide best-sellers this year. This is despite both of them running highly sought-after consulting and training businesses. I don't think you'll find anyone who will dispute that they're at the top of their games. Where do they find the time to do that work?

It's not about the time, and they don't need to write more books to be more successful. They'll both tell you that they know what their communities need, and they feel compelled to deliver. To them, writing those books isn't work; it's their calling. They channel their expertise in a way that few can. It's just not that difficult for them.

This past week, I spent a few days in Austin for Scott Ingram's Sales Success Summit. 100 or so current and aspiring top performers in an intimate setting, sharing stories and deconstructing what top performance looks like.

The consistent theme was around prioritizing deep work. It's the work that requires full mental engagement, like thinking through your account plan and your next few sales calls. It means getting out of your inbox for a few hours a day so you can creatively approach the problems you solve in the ways only you can solve them.

The people who think you have to work harder to get ahead typically bypass the important work in favor of being busy. That's a great way to get much less done than it looks, and it's a trap.

It's easy to lay this kind of concept out there for you, recommend a great book so you can learn about it, and then send you on your way. But that's what I'm here to do. I want to go a level deeper and tell you something about what I noticed from listening to the speakers this week.

After their presentations, I spoke with Ian Koniak, Michele Marshall, Melissa Gaglione, and Lynn Powers. There was a common thread that came up in their talks as well as a lot of the hallway conversations- alignment.

You can't do your best work unless there's alignment between what you sell, whom you sell it to, how you sell it, and why. To that end, if you're having a hard time setting aside distractions to do the important stuff, it could be a sign that they're the wrong things for you.

A big reason you find yourself having to hustle harder is because of a poor fit. Maybe you haven't learned your superpower and how to harness it. Maybe you're trying to grind it out for the wrong company, or you just weren't meant to have that position.

Greatness takes effort, but it doesn't have to be hard, and it definitely shouldn't be overwhelming. When you have the kind of alignment I'm talking about here, things tend to click into place. You feel like you catch breaks a little more often. Most importantly, when it comes time to do the heavy lifting, you lean into it rather than getting discouraged by it. It's literally the difference between having to do something and getting to do it.

If you feel like you'd be able to get ahead if only you hustled a little harder, take a step back. Do you really need to work harder, or just focus your efforts on fewer things that will make a bigger impact? If you know that but struggle to do it, is it you, or is the task a bad fit for you?

If you want to reach your potential and do your best work, you have to put yourself in the right position to succeed. A lot of the friction that impedes performance is taken for granted as "part of the job," but does it need to be? Is there another situation that would allow you to harness your superpower and thrive with less effort? The best salespeople have answered these questions, and I suggest you do the same.