Are your team salespeople or order-takers?
Giles Watson
Customer/client experience - legal and Professional practice mgmt. - Strategy - differentiation - pricing - Trainer & Consultant
Employing order takers over genuine salespeople will lead to lower sales.
Many individuals and organisations do just fine without really ‘selling’. Calls come in, many are converted to orders or sales. Job done?
Many people in sales roles are really just order takers – and they are great with enquiries where people pretty much know what they want, are willing to be sold to, and have pretty much decided to buy. But what about those people who don’t really know what they want, are cautious and still have to rationally decide, or emotionally commit to, buying. This is the jump between order takers and effective sales people.
Genuine salespeople focus on the emotions as much as information. They focus on meeting the customer’s emotional needs before their own information or process needs. Sales is an art where order-taking is a process.
By using more refined arts, sales people are able to convert significantly more enquiries and opportunities than mere order-takers.
Can you turn order takers into salespeople?
Yes, but it might not be easy.
As so often with sales challenges, learning a new approach or developing new skills isn’t the problem. The problem lies with mindset and attitude. Order-takers commonly believe:
- that they are doing a great job
- that they are building rapport & trust, that they are qualifying themselves and understanding a callers needs and everything else
- that there isn’t a problem
- that people know what they want
- that some people can’t be sold to
- that being more assertive with their sales efforts would be pushy and unprofessional
Changing beliefs such as the above often requires assertive coaching techniques where a number of beliefs are challenged, reframed into positive beliefs or knocked down so that the person can more honestly assess their own performance, and accept they need to change behaviours in order to sell more.
CX Training is a Brisbane based training organisation focusing on tailored in-house training workshops in sales, customer service and customer experience.