Sales — why you struggle to sell

Since the earliest days of commerce, and I am talking thousands of years here, salespeople have had one job and one job only. Convincing people to buy. As the sales coach Phil M. Jones would say “salespeople are professional mind maker-uppers”…they help people make up their mind.

Picture this. As you walk past a stall in a marketing in ancient Rome/Greece I step out in front of you and begin extolling the virtues of my lovely ceramic bowls. You are not really interested but I manage to convince you that your life will be better if you buy my stuff. Look at the quality…really hard wearing…hundreds of happy customers who are JUST LIKE YOU…eventually you buy. And, are probably very happy with your purchase.

I have SOLD YOU my product.

Nothing has changed really in 2000 years.

My ability to convince you to buy has been the determining factor to my success.

The vast majority of sales methodologies are based on the belief that the challenge to you making the sale lies in your ability to help people make up their mind that they need to buy, and need to buy from you. This has always been the art of selling. Objection handling, the alternative close, the now or never close, the assumptive close, the hard close - all of these are psychological tricks to make the buyer say yes and buy the product.

These methodologies evolved (understandably) because for many years your ability to close was the obstacle to sales and revenue.

If you weren’t able to close it was often simply because you hadn’t grasped or mastered these various sales techniques. The answer, obviously, was sales training.

Many smart people have developed this thinking in to incredible methodologies, MEDDIC, Challenger, SPIN, Sandler, Gap, SNAP and many more, each tackling a different part of the challenge: establishing yourself as an expert, helping the prospect to consider new solutions, navigating the process of the sale, building consensus/champions.

All of these are very clever. Each of these arguably has its place. Each of these has its advocates and fans, but none actually addresses the major problem we face today.

For thirty years the world has been changing in previously unimaginable ways. The profusion of competitors in the marketplace mean that your business is no long the only game in town, the internet provides real-time insight to the players in a way that wasn’t possible even twenty years ago and the homogeneity of all the stories told by you and your competitors means that often int he buyers eyes everyone appears to be equally good (or bad).?

This has led to confusion in the buyer’s mind and frustration in the seller’s, with sellers driven to make grander claims and use more beautiful imagery and language to draw the gaze of the buyer. Like a sort of marketing arms race.

Today, a successful sale is often as much to do with luck as it is design.

Over the last two years I have visited many companies and all of the sales leaders I have spoken to would agree that their sales teams are great at selling. Despite this assertion very few will consistently meet or exceed their targets. So why is this? What is going wrong?

Training and retraining the sales team in all of these different techniques and methodologies hasn’t worked in tackling the shortfall in their success.

The reason for this is that the problem isn’t in the closing, the problem is before that in the process.

There are a lot of cliches for this such as “We can't solve problems by using?the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” and “Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.” but the truth is that if you are not tackling the real issue it’s unlikely things will get much better.

Talking to the salespeople themselves they have an idea of what the problems is.?

People simply don’t want to talk to them.

Perhaps because they don’t want to be sold to, perhaps because they don’t like the look of the salesperson or they are just jaded because so many approaches have been made that ultimately fail to deliver on their promises but whatever the reason salespeople struggle to have meaningful conversations with the people that they need to.

None of the established sales methodologies address this problem.

There are a few additional problems that this shortfall in conversations causes:

1. Salespeople get very pressured if they only have one conversation per week and because of that they absolutely MUST make it count. Not surprisingly with so few meaningful conversations the salesperson isn’t able to relax in to the call and be at their most effective.
2. There is a poor mental health epidemic in sales. Part of the reason for this is that salespeople spend most of their days being told “I don’t want to talk to you, go away.” Not surprisingly this impacts on confidence and self-esteem.
3. There is no opportunity to practice. Yes, we can all do role-plays but nothing prepares you for a real live meeting. More practice equals better performance.
4. You can’t afford to qualify out. If you have 50 opportunities you can focus on just the good ones, the ones where the prospect is a good fit. When you have just two…you can’t. When you ave two you need to hang on to every single one and that means that the chances of recruiting a problem client are much higher.

So what do organisations need to do to in order to solve this challenge?

Well, the answer isn’t to have better marketing - because in many cases there is such huge disconnect between what marketing and sales believe a “lead” to be that a larger list of people yields nothing. The answer is to empower the individuals in your organisation to be more visible, more credible, more interesting and more approachable.

When we have seen clients deploy this thinking they generate a huge uplift in the number of (meaningful) conversations that they can create and this creates an equally impressive increase in pipeline and revenue. But it doesn't stop there, they also see:

1. Performance in meetings improves - 20 meetings per week means that salespeople can experiment with what they do to hone their talents.
2. Salespeople are happy. No longer are they stuck in a existential crisis of "am I in the right job" or "why will nobody talk to me," instead they are loving a job that means they spend half of their working week talking to people who value their opinion and want to talk to them.
3. Happy people stay in role longer and encourage others to join.

This is a sustainable, predictable solution to tackling the pipeline problem that they are facing.

To find out how you too can develop a behaviour that generates a predictable, repeatable stream of conversations with the people you would like to speak with drop us a line.

#socialselling #pipeline #digitalselling #salestransformation #sales