Q Dain Zaitz, Corvallis, Oregon

A First of all, forget some of the most basic habits you learned in school. Once you are in the real world . . . and it doesn't make any difference whether you are 22 or 62, starting your first job or your fifth . . . the way to look great and get ahead is to overdeliver.

Look, for years, you've been taught the virtues of meeting specific expectations.

And you've been trained that it's an A-plus performance to answer fully every question the teacher asks. Those days are over.

To get an A-plus in business, you have to expand the organisation's expectations of you and then exceed them, and you have to answer fully every question the "teacher" asks, plus a slew of questions he or she didn't even think of.

Your goal, in other words, should be to make your bosses smarter, your team more effective, and the whole company more competitive because of your energy, creativity and insights. And you thought school was hard!

But don't panic. Just get in there and start thinking big. If your boss asks you for a report on the outlook for one of your company's products over the next year, you can be sure she already has a solid sense of the answer. So go beyond being the grunt assigned to confirm her hunch.

Do the extra research, legwork and data-crunching to give her something that really expands her thinking. Produce an analysis of how the entire industry might play out over the next three years. It could answer vital questions like: What new companies and products might emerge?

What technologies could change the game? Could someone, perhaps your own company, move production to China?

In other words, give your boss something that shocks and awes her, something new and interesting that she can report to her bosses. In time, those kinds of ideas will move the company forward and you upward.

But be careful. Because people who strive to over-deliver can quickly selfdestruct if their big, wonderful, exciting suggestions are seen by others as unfettered braggadocio or not-so-subtle ladder-scaling . . . or both.

That's right, personal ambition can backfire. Now, we're not saying to curb your ambition. In fact, you should have tons of it. But the minute you wear career lust on your sleeve, you run the risk of alienating people, in particular your peers.

They will soon come to doubt the motives of your hard work. They will see any comments you make about, say, how the team could operate better as political jockeying. And they will eventually see you as a striver, and in the long run, that's a label that all the A-plus performing in the world can't overcome.

So by all means, over-deliver. But keep your desire to distinguish yourself as a winner to yourself. You'll become one faster.

Q Revenue growth is at the top of my to-do list. What should I look for in hiring great sales professionals?
John Cioffi, Westfield, New Jersey

A Good news. You're halfway there.

You realise that great salespeople are different to you, us and just about everyone. In fact, they're a breed apart.

This is not to say that salespeople shouldn't have the qualities you look for in every hire: integrity, intelligence, positive energy, decisiveness and the ability to execute. It's just that they need other qualities, too . . . four, to be exact.

The first is enormous empathy. Great salespeople feel for their customers. They understand their needs and pressures;

they get the challenges of their business.

They see every deal through the customer's eyes. Yes, they represent the company, and yes, they want to make it profitable. But they are geniuses at balancing the interests of the company and the interests of the customer so that, even at the end of difficult negotiations, both sides would describe the process as more than fair.

Not surprisingly, then, the second quality of great salespeople is trustworthiness.

Their word is good; their handshake means something. They see every sale as part of a long-term relationship, and customers usually respond in kind.

Third, great salespeople have a powerful mixture of drive, courage and selfconfidence. Cold calls are brutal. No one likes making them. But the best salespeople want to grow the business so badly that they dive into them relentlessly, day after day, and they have the inner strength not to take the inevitable rejections personally. They just take a deep breath and move on.

Finally, the best salespeople hate the "postman model" of doing business. No offence to letter carriers! It's their job to deliver mail along a set route every day.

And great salespeople certainly do a version of that too, selling current products to current customers.

But they can't help themselves . . . they also love to go off-road in search of product and customer opportunities. The best salespeople, for instance, think it's part of their job regularly to bring ideas home from the reaches, saying things like, "You know, if we could make XYZ, we could capture a whole new market out there."

In that way, then, the best salespeople are just like you. Revenue growth is at the top of their to-do list. Unlike you, they can make it the only thing on their list, since they aren't the boss and therefore don't have to be distracted with all kinds of other organisational matters. And that's what makes great salespeople so special.

Jack and Suzy Welch are the authors of the international best-seller 'Winning'.

You can e-mail them questions at Winning@nytimes. com. Please include your name, occupation, city and country.