STOP COMMISERATING NOW!

I regularly take time to listen to our younger, less experienced, sales consultants working the phones with prospects, trying to gauge their interactions and see what they may be able to improve on. This week I overheard one of our sales associates discussing the lack of inventory with a customer and decided to speak with him afterwards. To be honest, his interaction was normal in every sense of the word. There is no inventory, you can't punch an order with the manufacturer, no one has inventory to trade.

This same conversation is happening Nationwide, as I sit here and type out my thoughts. There is a pervasive sense of doom and gloom amongst sales managers and sales consultants that's been spreading uncontrolled for a while now. Between inventory levels, production delays, price increases, transportation shortages and ordering matrix/process changes, there really is no way around these uncomfortable dilemmas we've been dealing with consistently, over the course of the last two years. It just sucks - plain and simple.

That being said, I want to share what I shared with our associate, just a couple simple suggestions, which I myself learned almost a quarter century ago, in my first outside sales job with a rubber and plastics company in Dayton, OH.

1) STOP COMPLAINING TO THE CUSTOMER - You only get two responses when you complain about the circumstances preventing you from being of help to someone. They either: A) DON'T CARE about your problems, or B) are glad it’s YOUR problem and not their problem.

2) STOP THE BLEEDING - My first sales training ever was with the President's Club in Moraine, OH and we learned the Dave Sandler Sales Technique which involved finding out the pain a customer was having (find the bleeding) and STOP IT (Solve their problem). If YOU don't stop their bleeding, they will continue to search for someone who WILL.

Everyone's problem is the same in our industry. Customer are calling all over, they're scouring the internet to find something they can buy, but by the time they find it and get to it... POOF!!! It's GONE, baby GONE. Everyone knows it. Everyone is complaining about it, and every conversation is the same. "Sorry, nothing I can do."

BUT YOU CAN!!! What can you do about it? STOP!!! STOP complaining about it!!! People are calling and searching for solutions!!! Give them a SOLUTION. Stop commiserating and start actively participating in making them believe that YOU (and ONLY YOU) have a SOLUTION for them. Get their contact information, write down PRECISELY what they NEED, set an appointment go over their order, write them up, take a DEPOSIT, make sure they know their order will be the first one YOU will handle for them, when the availability to process their request is allowed.

Take them out of the market. Give them what NO ONE else they've talked to has given them - an actionable SOLUTION!

One of my all-time favorite movie lines sums up this subject quite nicely...

"Do you just TALK about it? - or - Do you STAND UP and DO SOMETHING about it? Because believe you me, all the rest of it is just coffee house bull$#!%." ~ Rocco, from The Boondock Saints.