Salespeople need to be masters at creating buying moments for their customers. To get the deal, you gotta work on the deal.
Besides, customers buy when they’re ready to buy, not because you’re ready to sell.
Despite this, a lot of sales professionals still find themselves with no deals even when it seems they did everything right. A sales conversation seems to be going the right way but you end up with a non-sale or a frozen lead.
We’re ripe into the second half of the year and it’s time to get in gear and minimize those no-deals.
Here are three mistakes you must watch out for at all costs to avoid no deals.
Going through the motions
First things first. Are you a bored salesperson?
Get to the office every day, make the same calls to the same people, get new prospects from the same sources. Use the same rules for handling objections and negotiations. Report to the manager. Rinse and repeat.
Is this you? Your results are OK. You make OK money. You go to work and go home feeling OK.
But chances are, when you’re not in the office, you complain about having to do the same damn thing day in and out.
There are salespeople who live in this reality day in and out. And these are the salespeople who eventually lose motivation and focus. They start going through the motions.
Your performance and results will suffer if you allow yourself to get bored. Bored salespeople don’t end up being successful.
If you’re one of these salespeople who have settled with the bare minimum, you will have to change now lest risk being ineffective and losing out to others who thrive in the world of sales.
Ok, repetition in itself is not bad. Our organizations have a sales process to follow. This has been polished and cemented and continuously improved day in and out.
How do you thrive in this “repetitive” sales field? Look at each sales conversation as an opportunity to be better at reading customers and closing.
Repetition in sales allows you to sharpen your skills every single day.
If you want to smash quotas and make a real career out of sales, you need to identify which of your daily tasks work 100% of the time and set them apart from those which only work 90% of the time and so on. Make the 100-percenters part of your everyday toolkit. For those that only work sometimes, keep them in your armory but continue to sharpen them. Have you noticed that prospects with a particular type of objection respond to a particular type of explanation? Note these down.
Even if being a salesperson means having to do a lot of things over and over again, each sales conversation is an opportunity to test out your weapons, validate your org’s sales process, and weed out the techniques that don’t work quite as well.
Sales pros who use this approach to constantly “train and retrain” themselves each day are those who succeed and hit their quotas out of the park.
Dropping prices as your weapon of choice
Deal droughts can make you take all sorts of not-so-smart decisions, one of which is going the easy route by dropping prices when times are tough.
Giving way price-wise not in any way an absolute mistake but many sales professionals fall into the trap of making it their crutch by having it as the first line of objection defense.
When you sell on price, you haven’t sold anything. What you’re doing is buying time with your customer’s business until a more valuable one comes along. When you sell on value, however, you own their business.
A key concept in value-based selling is assuming the role of a strategic partner rather than just a vendor. It works. A big chunk of our successes here at Tenfold is a result of our willingness to become part of our client’s problem-solving processes and seeking out ways to make their businesses more efficient. When you’re just another solution with the cheapest pricing, your customers think of you just the same–they chose you because you offered the cheapest solution, not really the best one.
There are several possible reasons why salespeople make the mistake of selling based on price.
It could be that they were taught to do so right from training. That’s a sales org problem that needs to be addressed. If you’re selling for a sales org that pushing price-based selling, you would notice the high employee turnover due to the burnout rate. Account management is in perennial infancy and the company’s business grows horizontally but not vertically.
Another could be because you don’t believe in the value of your own product or service. This could also be a training issue but it is your duty to embrace and understand your company’s competitive edge over other solutions so you can communicate them to your prospects.
Lazy salespeople relegate to price-based selling even when the thrust of the company is to provide value.
These salespeople are dangerous to sales organizations and should be weeded out if they remain unchanged.
Making decisions for your prospect
Why did you stop calling? Why did you not ask for their order?
Many salespeople fall into the trap of assumptions. Stop assuming that a prospect isn’t interested, that they’re too busy, or that it just isn’t the right time to be going after a certain deal. The reality of sales is you snack on rejection but the flipside of it is you lose everything you don’t go after. It hurts to get rejected but it’s working to detach negativity from rejection that will help you get deals.
Andrea Waltz, sought-after keynote speaker and co-author of Go For No!, has this to say for professionals who must face rejection in their work.
“Our attachment to the outcome, tend to make us less effective. For example, when it comes to selling, the ultimate place you can get to is where the words YES and NO contain the same emotional charge. And this means being more dispassionate when it comes to selling your product, service, opportunity, and even yourself.
There is no denying that there is some part of us that will always be happier when we hear ‘yes.’ After all, we’re human! We will never be able to be totally dispassionate about some outcomes. But the goal is clearly to reach a point where the difference between the elation of hearing ‘YES’ and the deflation of hearing NO is minimized… even if it can’t be eliminated entirely.”
Finish the rest of the year with a relentless attitude, go for the wins, accept that there will be NOs, and minimize no-deals. Follow up on every prospect.
Stop assuming the worst just to avoid rejection.
Making these mistakes? Review your performance and start making a habit of arresting these mistakes as they happen.
It’s never too late to retrain yourself and get those deals. Five months to go before the year ends!
Original article from Tenfold can be found here:
https://www.tenfold.com/sales-performance/3-sales-mistakes-closers-never-make/