You Probably Won't Want To Change This...But Maybe You Should?
Roy Johnson
Sales and sales leadership trainer and coach. Sandler Training Franchisee of the year. Showing B2B how to sell more, quicker, while increasing market share & profit margins. Half day sales meeting training and workshops
In his recent book, Change or Die, author Alan Deutschman claims that although we have the ability to change our behaviour, we rarely do. In fact, the odds are nine-to-one that when faced with a dire need to change, we won’t. Our beliefs are what we feel in our gut, and those beliefs are hard to change; we spent a lifetime developing and defending them. This explains why providing information rarely changes how people think or act.
This also explains why your best presentation may have absolutely no positive effect on your prospect’s desire to buy and why most salespeople continue shovelling information, features, benefits, and fancy presentations at prospects, even though those tactics don’t cause people to buy!
Somewhere along the way, early in our sales careers, we learn that we must convince buyers to love our stuff by overloading them with information, facts and reasons to buy. Traditional sales training reinforces this notion by emphasising the presentation as the most important step in the sales process.
Somehow we forget that WE never bought anything based on a presentation; we buy things because we want them or need them, not because a sales person tells us they’re great.
Try to make these changes to your selling behaviour:
- STOP talking about your features and benefits.
- STOP dumping information on prospects.
- WAIT as long as you can to tell the prospect anything about your company.
Recognise that you can change and definitely improve your sales performance. But it takes a concerted effort to change long-term, ingrained habits. A half-day get-motivated program won’t do it. There are people in your industry making twice as much money as you by selling the same product to the same market as you. There’s a reason, it’s called behaviour. Make a positive change to your selling behaviour and you’ll make a positive change to your income.
If you would like to learn more about how Sandler Training will help you grow your business, click here to book a place on our next Sales Masterclass on 21st February.
Adapted from a blog by Brad McDonald, Feb 2017.