If you missed Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I highly encourage you to review them before diving into this final portion to understand how Mindset and Skillset prepare you for optimizing your sales Toolset.

Once you’ve aligned your beliefs and best practices to create winning sales habits, you’re better able to build the systems or tools required to drive and sustain growth. In this final part of our three-part series, we’ll explore the role of the sales Toolset and how to combine it with your growth Mindset and Skillset to achieve your definition of success.

Understanding the Role of Your Sales Toolset

Psychologists define habits as “automatic behaviors triggered by situational cues.” When salespeople embark on a mission of mastery, it is not enough to simply open our minds to the possibility that our personal beliefs (Mindset) and best practices (Skillset) may need to change. We must also commit to the process of reinforcing what we learn to help create new automatic behaviors, i.e. new winning habits, that can be intuitively summoned when we encounter key situational cues during the sales process.

Sales tools alone are not enough for salespeople to succeed, yet investment in sales productivity solutions remains a top priority of sales organizations. Just 20 years ago, a Google search for sales growth tools would have yielded about a dozen or so results. Today, that number is closer to 3 million, with the industry having climbed to over $1.2 billion.

But what should be the central focus is curating a Toolset that encourages us to develop and use our Winning Habits when presented with new challenges and obstacles.

Investing in the Right Toolset

Companies across industries are feeling the pressure of investing in newer, shinier, tech-heavy sales tools, and there are an increasing number of “solutions” to fuel that growing interest. Promises of working faster, saving money, and automating tasks have taken priority over the more important understanding of how these benefits will prime them for predictable, repeatable sales growth.

Effective sales Toolsets include a structured and dynamic sales process, a staged and predictable sales pipeline, a detailed and updated sales playbook, and a data-centric recruiting and onboarding program that eliminates the guesswork from sourcing, screening, selecting and securing motivated top performers.

These Toolsets extend beyond the main sales floor. True sales success relies on the support of HR, IT, and Marketing to help provide talent sourcing, IT systems support, and qualified leads that are aligned with your unique sales environment. The actions of these departments contribute to overall revenue growth as well as the salesperson’s ability to sell effectively.

When you’re able to align your growth Mindset with support roles and their effects on your sales team, you’re better positioned to establish the Skillset and Toolset required to execute winning habits.

Aligning Mindset, Skillset and Toolset

To summarize, Winning Habits are achieved by developing and aligning the Mindset, Skillset and Toolset we bring to our roles as high-performing salespeople, sales managers and sales executives.

Our Mindset is determined by the personal beliefs we bring to our role, but a winning Mindset is defined by beliefs that are aligned with our definition of success. Our Skillset is determined by the best practices we bring to our role, but a winning Skillset is defined by best practices that are focused on our definition of success. And, a Toolset is determined by the systems we bring to our role, but a winning Toolset is represented by systems that reinforce our definition of success.

Together, we can align our Mindset, Skillset, and Toolset to create predictable, repeatable processes that cater to our unique abilities and how we’re best able to achieve sustainable sales success.