You set up a meeting with a high level prospect which took weeks to make happen. She is a decision maker with a problem in a company which is your ideal prospect. If you are like the typical salesperson (remember 76% of salespeople are ineffective) You will take the following actions:
• Invite your boss or a technical person to come with you
• Prepare 20 PowerPoint slides to impress the prospect with
• Check out the prospects website and linkedin profile

If you are the optimal salesperson you will do the following:
• Do some research on the prospect and her problem
• Talk to your tech team and/or boss to bone up on questions you should ask
• Go on the call prepared and alone
The optimal salesperson realizes that in a preliminary meeting the primary objective is to establish a relationship, uncover the essence of the problem and the pain that the prospect is experiencing, see how much money they are willing to commit to the project and then give a summary of how your people would approach the problem or have approached similar problems in the past. The final step would be to move the project forward by setting up follow-on meetings before you leave the first meeting. The optimal salesperson further realizes that the prospect is more likely to open up with only two in the meeting and bringing the boss to an initial meeting devalues the boss and will cause the salesperson to lose control of the meeting. As a general rule take as few people to a sales call as you can get away with. The meetings will be easier to control and have a better outcome.

You work hard. You don’t waste time. You have good sales skills you hit your number this year after 3 years of falling short. But, you need to get to the next level to hit your financial goals. So what can you do? Your sales need to increase by 40%. Can you find another 20 hours in the work week? The answer is probably not! Can you increase your closing percentage by 40 percent? Again the answer is probably not. So it is obvious that what got you here may not get you where you want to go. So what can you do?

The answer is that you need to do something different. Call on bigger accounts. Spend more time working on getting introductions to senior executives. Change your belief in what you can accomplish? In short, you must make some major change because just doing more of the same is not an option. The very first step is to raise your expectation and belief about what is possible. As Napoleon Hill said a generation or 2 ago “whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve”. As you prepare to do business in the time after the pandemic this sales tip is even more applicable. You may have to change your mindset to be successful.

The first rule of holes is that if you are in one stop digging. Similarly, the first rule of ruts is if you are in one do something different. Do anything different. Not just a little different … a lot different. Double the amount of calls you try to make in a day. Radically change your schedule for a week. Wake up earlier … work later … skip lunch …change how you describe your product …change the order in which you ask the questions … review your notes from your last sales training class (you may have to dust them off first) … ask some of the questions you were taught to ask but have stopped asking for some reason …ask a question you have never asked before … change the level at which you call in a company …change the way you start a prospecting call …ask someone you have never asked for a referral.
What you will find is that different stuff starts to happen. You have to react differently. You find yourself in a different place. You will find that your energy level changes and your results will change. You won’t be beating your head against the same walls and in most cases you will have better results, be earning more money and the rut will become a distant memory.

People tend to live up to (or down to) the expectations of people that they respect and who they want to earn approval from. Sometimes you can get trapped in a situation where you are the best salesperson on a weak sales team. Management thinks highly of you and you win salesperson of the month awards regularly. But their expectation of you may be too low. What if you worked on another team where you consistently came in the middle of the pack, but management’s expectation of you was much higher and to you it seemed out of reach? How would you react? If you have a winner’s mentality, then you will work harder seek help, or do whatever it took to reach or achieve what is expected of you. So the lesson here is not to be trapped by the low expectation of others. Whatever you are achieving now, expect to do more. Expect to earn more. Expect to do it in less time. Expect more and you will achieve more.

For those of you who track your sales activity (an admittedly small group), now is a great time to analyze the activity you collected last year to determine if your current level activity will get you to the undoubtedly higher goals that you have set this year. Is your closing rate high enough? Are you scheduling enough appointments? At the current rate of uncovering qualified opportunities will you be able to write enough business to meet the goal if your current close rate holds? Is your average sales high enough? You should have enough data to answer all of these questions (if you don’t that is a whole other issue and you should start collecting the data).
If the analysis shows that you will not be able to hit the goals for this year at the current activity level, you will have to make some changes. Here are some possible remedies:
• Make more calls and talk to more people
• Qualify harder to eliminate quoting deals you know you have a low probability of winning.
• Stop calling on smaller clients to increase your average sales and increase the time you have to work with more profitable prospects.
• Improve your sales skills by reading a book, getting a coach or taking a course.
• Do all of the above.

When people have their heels dug in it is very difficult to move them. Pressuring prospects and trying to overcome objections is the hard way to get your product sold. The best approach is to determine what problem or pain the prospect has and then align your product or service with that. In other words, show the prospect that your service will help them achieve their goals. This approach requires that you focus on the prospect and his or her problem for the majority of the sales call rather than spending your time explaining your product or service and what benefits it has. The only supposed “benefits” the prospect cares about are the ones that help him achieve his goal. If you have something that you think might be a benefit to the prospect, first ask some questions to determine if they have a problem or a desire that the product might address. If they do, then proceed to explain the benefit. If not, then move on to the next question. This will save you a lot of aggravation and let the prospect feel that she is in control of the process … never a bad thing.

If you show up on a sales call with a new prospect and you haven’t looked them up on social media you will have two big problems on your hands. The first, and probably the most important, is that you risk coming off as unprepared, uninterested and unprofessional. Research is so easy now it only takes a minute or two to learn the basics about a company or individual from their website or LinkedIn page. The second issue is that checking them out ahead of time can give you ideas on how to approach the sales call. You may discover that you have a common friend. Or you may discover that you have relevant experience in a part of the business you were not planning on talking about. At the very least you can speed up the call by already having a context for the discussion you are about to have with the prospect. Don’t spend all day on it but a few minutes (2-4) can be well worth the investment of time.

What gets measured gets done. Tracking your sales activity is like eating your vegetables. You don’t like to do it but the long term positive results are undeniable. In athletic metrics are all the rage. Baseball in particular has come up with all sorts of new things to track like launch angle and exit velocity for hitters. Devotees swear they can just look at the numbers and tell how a player is performing and will perform in the future. It is not that complicated in sales. A few simple numbers will suffice – attempted calls, conversations, appointments, and qualified opportunities. Of course there are the ones everyone tracks – proposals and sales. My message is brief today … track your activity or give up a great opportunity to accelerate your growth.

“No one buys during the holidays”. “If I don’t hit my number by Thanksgiving it’s over”. These are two of the most common refrains I hear salespeople singing this time of year. Salespeople believe it, then work hard to make it come true. They curtail their sales activity, they mentally shut down until the new year and they hang on for the end of the year. Now, if you have your numbers wrapped up by November 15th, go ahead and take a break if you need to or want to. But selling this time of year can be very lucrative. Many sales people are at higher commission rates having hit ratchet points earlier in the year. Many clients have extra money at the end of the year. People are in a better mood this time of year. The competition has shut down so there is less competition for the remaining budget dollars. People are less likely to travel this time of year to be close to home for the holidays. So change your belief about what is possible and ramp up your activity. You will be surprised at the results you can get this time of year. At the very least you will set yourself up for a hot start in the new year.

When you are apprehensive about asking a question in a selling situation, just ask the prospect whether it is ok to ask. You will find that they always give you permission. You will also find that your reluctance to ask is most often not based in objective reality but in your own self-limiting beliefs or insecurity. If a question seems tough to you it is because it starts to infringe on what you believe is inappropriate. For example, many people are reluctant to ask about money. That is based on their belief that it is impolite or not socially acceptable or the fact that they are uncomfortable about discussing money in general or because they are not sure their product is worth that much or it seems like a lot of money to them. The list could go on and on. The sooner you recognize that you are the problem the sooner you can start to obliterate your beliefs by getting out of your comfort zone and seeing that what you were afraid would happens almost never happens. Your income will grow in proportion to the effort you put into getting out of your comfort zone.