Quotes from Jill Konrath

The best sales questions have your expertise wrapped into them.

I got lucky because I never gave up the search. Are you quitting too soon? Or are you willing to pursue luck with a vengeance?

You have to drop your sales mentality and start working with your prospects as if they've already hired you.

If you're having trouble, it's because you just don't know how - yet!

If you're struggling to get into big companies, you probably have a weak value proposition. Pure and simple.

Know your buyer's journey so you can align with it.

Eliminate multitasking to learn faster and think better.

Create cheat sheets to help new info stick in your brain better.

In a study of new hire agents at MetLife, the optimists outsold the pessimists by 31 percent.

You've probably never heard anyone talk about sales agility before. Sales training programs don't even mention the word. But every top seller I know is an agile learner who knows what it takes to dive into a new situation and figure it out quickly.

When you're deep in study mode, stop every thirty minutes to review what you've just learned. Repeat the information you just covered out loud to yourself. This helps cement it in your brain even more when you want to recall it.

To learn faster, chunk, sequence, connect, dump, practice, and prioritize.

Sellers who are successful today know that customers can go online and find out all that stuff in seconds.

Chunking strategies minimize mental chaos and increase recall.

According to sales management expert Lee Salz, it takes a minimum of eight months for new salespeople to perform at the same level as their tenured colleagues—even if they're experienced sellers.

Never go behind someone's back. If you need to meet with people other than the person you're currently working with, make sure you find a valid reason for it and, if possible, engage your current contact in setting it up.

According to research from the Sales Benchmark Index, 60 percent of all forecasted opportunities are lost to "no decision.

All the top sellers I know possess a unique balance of positivity and negativity. They're always optimistic about the ultimate outcomes, but they sometimes seem paranoid about everything that could possibly go wrong. That's why they succeed.

Become an expert on your biggest competitor—the status quo.

Success is a decision. Dare to choose it.

According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, only 15 percent of executives say their meetings with salespeople met their expectations. From that, only 7 percent of execs actually scheduled follow-up conversations.

You know what buyers pick as the differentiator in their decisions? The sales experience* itself—what it's like working with you during the course of all your interactions. They think this experience as a whole is more important than all the other factors combined.

Here's what it all boils down to: To become the differentiator, you need to always be learning.

According to research by Korn/Ferry International, "Learning agility is a leading predictor of leadership success today—more reliable than IQ, EQ [emotional intelligence] or even leadership competencies.