Two Perspectives, One Truth: What Really Makes a Salesperson Great?

In sales, few questions spark more debate than this:

What makes a salesperson great?

Ask a sales manager, and you will get one answer. Ask a customer, and you will often get another. Yet, when you strip away the surface differences and dig deeper, both are describing the same person. They are just doing it from different perspectives.

Sales managers view greatness through the lens of performance and consistency. They need results. They want salespeople who:

• Build and manage a pipeline effectively. The manager values disciplined prospecting, timely follow-ups, and a strong close ratio.
• Hits or exceeds quota. Performance is measurable, and metrics are the scorecard.
• Executes the sales process. Great salespeople follow the playbook while adding their own style and nuance.
• Demonstrates coachability, encourages and accepts feedback, grows from it, and helps lift the rest of the team.
• Protect margins. They know how to negotiate without giving away the farm.

To a manager, the great salesperson is dependable, strategic, and consistent, a professional who executes repeatable excellence.

But customers do not care about quotas or CRM compliance. Their definition of greatness starts somewhere else entirely.

Customers define greatness through experience, trust, and helpfulness, not metrics. To them, the great salesperson is the one who will:

• Listen more than talk, and seek to understand first, then suggest ideas or solutions.
• Provide insight, help customers see new opportunities or risks they have not considered.
• Add value beyond the product or service and foster conversations that make the customer's job easier, their decisions more transparent, and their outcomes more effective.
• They do what they say they will do and accept responsibility when things go wrong. They are authentic and dependable.
• Respect the customer's time and intelligence, and are not pushy. They align the objectives of all stakeholders in the customer organization and in their own company.

To customers, greatness looks more like a resource. It is less about process and more about presence.

The behaviors that create great customer experiences are the same behaviors that produce great sales results.

A salesperson who deeply understands the customer's world will naturally forecast more accurately. They negotiate from a position of value rather than price. They build long-term relationships that sustain pipeline growth. In other words, what the customer calls trust, the sales manager calls predictability.

When managers and customers talk about greatness, they are actually describing two sides of the same coin.

• Managers want execution, growth, and consistency.
• Customers want empathy, competence, and insight.

But one without the other does not last. Empathy without execution creates a pleasant experience with no measurable results. Execution without empathy produces short-term wins but erodes trust in the long run.

The authentic professional blends both, turning empathy into strategy and process into collaboration.

The best organizations define greatness as the alignment of customer success and company success. Customers reward sales managers who coach to that standard with loyalty.

That means training and evaluation must evolve. Instead of measuring activity alone, managers should measure impact. Instead of praising only the fastest closers, celebrate the most trusted advisors. Instead of treating customer satisfaction as a soft metric, recognize it as the strongest predictor of future revenue.

When salespeople and customers speak the same language of value, everyone wins.