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If you’re a sales leader in technology and are trying to build a high-performance sales team, here are three essential virtues to look for when hiring your team.

Personal story

A few years back, I was attending Veeam’s annual sales kick-off. At the time, Peter McKay, Veeam’s president, was taking questions from the audience at the end of his presentation.

A young sales rep stood up and asked Peter what he looked for when hiring sales professionals.

Without hesitating or batting an eye, Peter said he looks for people who are Humble, Hungry AND Smart….but before he could explain, the stop signal on stage turned red, and he closed his session.

I was taken aback by how easily those three words flowed off Peter’s tongue like he had said them a thousand times before.

Google humble, hungry and smart

So at the break, I googled humble, hungry, and smart, and guess what came up?

It’s a book entitled The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni, the same author who wrote The
Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

I hit the buy now button and finished the book on my flight home from Las Vegas.

The ideal team player is a very quick read and starts with a fable that describes the three essential virtues of ideal team players.

It talks about how the very best teams, teams that work incredibly well together and produce fantastic results, are made up of individuals with these three virtues.

Not one or two…but all three of them

• Humble
• Hungry
• Smart
  
  

Humility: is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player. Great team players lack excessive ego or concerns about status. They are quick to point out the contributions of others and slow to seek attention for themselves.

Hungry: people who are always looking for more. More things to do. More to learn. More responsibility to take on. Hungry people rarely have to be pushed by a manager to work harder because they are self-motivated and diligent. “It’s not my job” is not part of their vocabulary.

And finally, Smart: It’s not what you think.

It’s not about IQ or intellectual capacity. In a team context, smart refers to a person’s common sense about people. Do they understand the impact their words have on others… It’s EQ vs IQ.

So this got me thinking about my own leadership team and some of the challenges I was having with one of our leaders. His results were good, but it seemed no one had a good thing to say about him.

I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

So, I went down the list

Humble, NO. Hungry, not really. Smart… yikes, a BIG NO. It was an aha moment for me, and I knew what I needed to do.

I’ve found that looking at teams through the lens of humble, hungry and smart gives you a whole new perspective on why some teams work so well together while others have all sorts of drama and noise surrounding them.

I bought the book for our leadership team, had everyone read it, and then adopted Humble, Hungry and Smart as our new vocabulary around teamwork.

Our SE leader even went out and had a blackjack chip made to remind us of the three critical virtues of teamwork. I keep it on my desk face up.

Humble, Hungry and Smart

Give it a try and see if it doesn’t give you a whole new perspective on what it takes to build a high-performance team of ideal players.

• See you next week when I ask; Should you try to schedule a win-loss review when you lose a big deal?

See you Saturday.

Great Selling – Jeff@SalesLeadersOnly.com