Sales Leaders want their reps to sell better, but don't like being sold to by better reps.

Selling to Sales Leaders can be REALLY hard.

A large part of my role here at Refract is engaging with senior sales leaders, understanding about their team, how they sell, how they as managers coach, and what they want to do to really improve results.

Last week I had a discovery call with a Sales Director of a reasonably sized software company (circa 50 sales people). They had been growing fast but their growth was flatlining. When digging into their sales process, unsurprisingly my prospect indicated that they felt the discovery stage was letting many of their opportunities down. They felt only 20% of their reps were having effective discovery conversations, and so that in turn meant a huge 80% of their discovery calls were not ending up with the desired outcomes. I asked them what their perception was of ‘effective discovery’, and the response was along the lines of ‘getting past level one questions and really digging deep into the impact of not making a change’.

When drilling down further to understand what this lopsided ratio was costing the business in lost sales and revenue, the prospect instantly put up the barriers:

“I can see what you’re trying to do here Richard - you're doing what my reps don't do”

With a jovial bit of laughter of the irony of the situation, I decided to proceed. I asked the prospect further questions about how long they could go on as a sales team with so many lost opportunities, due to not having an effective means to make their reps have better conversations?

“Listen Richard, I can see what you are trying to do here. You don’t need to sell to me. I get it. Maybe we can just move on to a demo.”

The prospect ultimately felt uncomfortable being asked the kind of questions they REALLY wanted their own reps to be asking on their discovery calls. They want their reps to become better sellers (because their job rides on it), but pull up the defence shields when being engaged by reps who are trying to ‘discover’ how they truly might be able to help. When the tables had been turned, there was reticence from the prospect to ‘open up’.

Low and behold I pushed back, and said there was no point in me giving a demo, until I truly knew how I could help.

I’m a firm believer that in sales conversations, it’s not enough to just have the prospect say ‘you don’t need to sell to me, I get it’. If you want to really uncover prospect pain and compelling reasons for them to make a change, they need to verbally tell you. They need to let the words come out of their mouth. They need to say loud and clear:

"RICHARD - THIS IS A PROBLEM WE NEED TO SOLVE OR WE WILL CONTINUE TO FAIL."

Without prospects doing so, then you are forever making assumptions. When they hold back their ‘why’, then you are likely never going to create the urgency to buy. You will always be a few steps down the priority list. Despite you knowing they need to change, if they themselves don’t say those words, then the likelihood is they will bury the issue for another few months until your competitor comes along.

Getting prospects to open up and tell you their ‘why’ is hard. This Sales Leader was ultimately frustrated that their own reps weren’t able to get their prospects to give them the ‘why’.

Perhaps in this situation, I simply didn’t do a good enough job of getting the prospect comfortable enough to tell me theirs.

Whats your own experiences and challenges of getting to the 'why'?