Sales Tips
Like the often-heard sales cliché says, it’s a numbers game. But what do you do when the number of prospects is fine, and the number of sales is not? How does a sales manager deal with slumps, dog days and unresponsive prospects?
One helpful technique involves the concept of “usable rejects.” One of my first sales managers told salespeople to cull accounts they weren’t making progress with and trade them with other salespeople, not unlike kids swapping baseball cards. Although this practice often helped sales, by itself it often had more of a placebo effect than a long- term change.
An important part of the “usable rejects” process is to verify that all the appropriate sales checkpoints have been observed. The accounts don’t even have to be traded, just re-examined.
Many computer users and technicians have been confronted with a frustrating, puzzling system failure that didn’t make sense. In the heat of the moment, a basic troubleshooting step was over- looked, and a simple problem was blown out of proportion. Dealing with slumps or problem prospects can be like that. Follow four key checkpoints to make sure that you are doing the right things with prospects:
• Talk to the right person. When progress with a prospect is not up to expectations, the most common problem is that you are not talking to the decision maker. Salespeople often have a large pool of prospects to call on, and there are multiple decision-makers and “decision-influencers” at many of those prospects. Often, the initial contact with vendors is delegated to people whose function is to do some screening and make a recommendation. As a result, it’s easy to make invalid assumptions or be steered to a someone who’s only a screener.
• Set sales call goals. Another major failure that delays the sales process is inadequate sales call goal setting. Building the supplier/client relationship is great, but if that’s the only goal for a sales call, it’s not likely that anything is objectives such as “getting to know the people,” or “making the customer feel good about us” should be a danger signal to sales managers.
I believe that the single best piece of advice I can give for closing a sale is to teach sales people the difference between a continuation and an advance, and help them make an advance the objective of their calls.
Successful salespeople know when they’ve made measurable progress with a prospect. Top performers are only happy when the prospect has agreed to some action that moves the sale toward a decision. A recent sale provides a good example of an advance. The salesperson was calling on a senior manager at a major corporation where a purchasing freeze was in effect. The call did not start easily.
When the salesperson was asked why he was there, he replied that he knew about the purchasing freeze, but he also knew that it would not last forever. The salesperson said that he wanted to know what he could do to compete for business when the freeze was over. From that opening, the call progressed into a 30-minute discussion during which the salesperson discovered operational policies, needs, problems and possible solutions. The salesperson got a commitment to advance by asking how he could get his name on the vendor list, which the manager had compiled for the day when the freeze would end. The manager told him that he was already on it, and that he would get a call a few days before the freeze was over.
• More checkpoints .Find specific needs. The failure to uncover specific needs of the prospect holds up a great many potential sales. In the previous example, the salesman didn’t get a commitment just because of his call objective. Uncovering needs that he could meet led to the commitment.
Too often salespeople rattle on about guaranteed 4-hour response time, free loaners or the new “bridge” service agreement, although they have yet to hear word one about what the prospect needs. Even though we know that features don’t make the sale, most salespeople sometimes fall into the trap of listing features.
An important checkpoint for any recalcitrant prospect is to ask yourself what you’ve learned about the clients’ needs. What are the compelling forces that would move them into a service agreement? If you don’t know, some skillful probing is in order. Once you have uncovered needs that your organization can fulfill, progress toward a sale is much more likely.
• Don’t make assumptions.
Sometimes our own assumptions get in the way of advancement toward a sale. A salesman I met likes to tell about the time he was trying to get some service business with a large aerospace company that was using another service vendor exclusively. The prospect was not especially happy with that service, but he wouldn’t consider a trial period with any other vendor, not even in just one department. The decision- maker said he wanted only one service provider.
After a few months, the salesperson became quite frustrated because it seemed as if there was a good match between the prospect’s needs and his company’s service. He wondered why he couldn’t even get a small part of this huge chunk of business. Then one day he went back with a proposal to handle all service and totally displace the existing vendor. It was accepted.
The salesperson later asked why such a proposal hadn’t been suggested up front. The decision-maker replied that he assumed the salesman’s company was too small to handle everything, since he’d only asked for a fraction of the business. It pays to avoid making assumptions.
