Sales Training Series #14

Insights from recent trainings

Welcome back to another Sales Training series!

These posts are intended to give you insight into what it’s like to train with me while providing actionable tips you can use in your day to day.

Note: I intentionally keep the descriptions of my clients vague for privacy reasons.

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What we’re covering today:

- Showing the prospect how to buy from you

- Finding emotion in numbers

- Finding the economics of the problem

- How to avoid leaving money on the table when selling to existing accounts

- Asking the right questions at the right time

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Telling is not Selling

Salespeople need to stop telling the buyers and instead put more effort on coming up with the right questions that get the prospect to realize the point they want to make.

The problem with “telling” is 2 fold:

1. Prospects often don’t believe salespeople and will resist the overt attempts at convincing

2. The more “telling” you do without first understanding the full picture, the more assumptions you need to make in order to continue “telling”.. You’re assuming everything you’re telling the prospect is relevant to them or that they’ll agree with everything you’re saying. Slim odds there.

So what ends up happening is:

• sellers having a high talk % in their calls (~70%+)

• the prospect feeling uncomfortable being talked at for so long

• and the seller wasting unnecessary time & energy “convincing”

The funny thing is if this strategy didn’t work at all, then sellers wouldn’t continue doing it.. but the problem is, it does work. Sometimes.

And salespeople cling onto that “one time” something worked as justification for continuing self defeating behavior.

They’re addicted to hopium.

From a recent coaching session:

The seller likes to find “alignment” on urgency/timelines and then launches into educator mode talking the majority (70%+) of the call.

Prospect asks a question:

“How long does the [xyz] process typically take?”

And the seller talks at the prospect for a few minutes about how his service works while making many assumptions along the way.

Assuming things like:

• The buyer wants to / doesn’t want to rush by getting started on [timeframe]

• The buyer cares / doesn’t care about having [specific criteria in place before moving forward]

• The buyer wants help with [specific parts of the process] and how they can support the buyer in that process

• The buyer is okay dropping a certain amount on advertising

This is a ton of assumptions made in only a few minutes!

Think about what negative effect this can have on the remainder of their call.

The seller would be better served by being more patient, methodical, and curious: