Archives for November 2018

You need to internalize your successes. If you accomplish something outside your normal comfort zone, it is important to give yourself credit for it. Unfortunately, the tendency of most salespeople is to feel that closing an extremely large deal or blowing away the quota this quarter when that is unusual for them was due to outside forces like luck or favorable market conditions or things “just falling in place”. When you think like this, you are perpetuating your comfort zone. You are finding an excuse why it wasn’t you who did it. After all, people like you just don’t accomplish those types of things. What you should do is congratulate yourself and internalize the result. Understand the value you brought to the situation and realize that you have the native talent to accomplish this every time. You have to start believing that you are a million dollar a quarter type of person. You are capable of closing big deals. Once you actually believe that, you will replicate that result continually. Eventually you will be surprised when you don’t have those accomplishments. But it all starts with giving yourself credit for the successes you do have. To discount them will stunt your growth as a salesperson.

Sales calls are often full of noise and you need to filter it out and not be distracted by it. I define noise as anything that distracts you from the goal of the sales call or is not helping to move the “ball” down the field. Sometimes the prospect will give you lots of irrelevant information about the project but is shies away from talking about his actual motivation for moving forward. In other words, at the end you know a lot about the project but no idea whether there is a compelling reason to move forward. In that case you were distracted by the noise. Sometimes prospects (and salespeople) talk about personal stuff to excess leaving no time to discuss the pain they are in and the decision process they need to go through to get the deal done. If that is the case, then, as important as bonding with the prospect is, you were distracted by the noise (personal information or sports stories) on this sales call. There are many other examples such as excessive detailed information which is irrelevant to the sales process but I think you get the idea. You need to listen through the noise to pick out the pain indicators or other hooks to get the conversation back on track and moving toward achieving the goal of the sales call.

Just because the price of a product is lower it does not necessarily mean that the value is greater. If a car has 4-wheel drive, a sun roof and real leather seats it probably costs more than the identical car without those extras. The car salesman might claim that the vehicle with the extras has added value because of the extras, especially since he is throwing them into the deal at 50% of their normal cost. However, if I am a car buyer who hates sun roofs (It messes with my hair and I try to avoid the sun. Besides they leak.), I live in Florida where it never snows and I never drive off road, and I am a member of PETA (people for the ethical treatment of animals), those extras have no value to me. They might actually act as a deterrent to my purchasing that vehicle. Admittedly, I chose an extreme example. But I think you get the idea. If I am using the car every day to commute, I may care more about gas mileage than prestige or load capacity. In that case, a car with higher gas mileage may be a better value even though it costs more because it solves my pain. So, focus your efforts on finding and solving the pain rather than on sharpening your pencil to give them a better price.