Problem: Phil is a salesperson I coach and he told me about a quote he had done on a 5-axis CNC machine for a potential new customer. He swore during our coaching sessions it was a “sure deal.” I just got off the phone with Phil who informed me the deal went to a competitor. He had called to review what went wrong. “I don’t understand,” he stated, “I quoted exactly what they wanted.”
Problem: What salesperson gets an adequate supply of referrals? Most don’t. For most, getting good referrals is a matter of chance, not choice. And yet, referrals are the best source of new business. Without referrals, salespeople are dependent on other prospecting sources such as cold calling, and cold calling is the least productive of new business development efforts.
Problem: Mitch’s company sold data storage solutions. A five-year veteran of selling, he called the other day for some coaching. He said that he had just completed a one-hour meeting with one of his top prospects, a large retailer who was a key prospect for his company. He explained that he had experienced difficulty getting the prospect into a discussion of pain and, when he finally did, he felt time pressure to hurry through the qualifying process. As a result, Mitch thought that he had done a poor job in the pain step. He said that this seemed typical of his meetings and that due to poor qualifying on his part, he was not closing some of the accounts that he thought he should.
Problem: Kelly’s company had developed a training program for their customers (and prospects) that was designed to position them as a leader in their industry, enable their customers to use their technology more effectively and reduce emergency calls to the tech support department. Kelly was having difficulty determining why one of his largest customers was not moving forward on enrolling his people in this important training program sponsored by his company. Granted, the training was not free, but at $995 per person it had the potential to save his client many thousands of dollars per year. He had already determined that the customer was concerned about the high number of incidents of faulty applications that the training program was developed to address, so there was significant pain. Basically, this seemed to be a “no brainer.” But, Kelly just couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get the deal closed and it was clear that, unless he was able to get to the root of the problem, the idea would die a slow death.
Problem: Many distributers are frustrated because they have to participate in a competitive bidding process to obtain business. Winning is often based on having the lowest bid. More than in any other type of sale, the buyer is in total control of the process. All information is disseminated to the bidders at a common bid conference and individual meetings are rare. The seller has no advantage over his competitors and frequently is reduced to guessing what his company will need to win the bid. If there are six qualified distributers bidding, your chances are less than 20% of winning the bid. And if you’re the “lucky” one that is awarded the bid, chances are your margins won’t be as healthy as you’d like.
Problem: Objections are probably the most misunderstood area of selling and typically salespeople are not very good at dealing with them.
Analysis: Experience tells us that objections are really not “buying signals” like the sales gurus of old have told us. In fact, objections could be deal breakers if we don’t handle them properly so most salespeople would rather not deal with them at all. Traditional methods of handling objections (memorizing ten ways to defeat the price objection, etc.) are not real world solutions for most salespeople. They can’t remember most of them under pressure anyway, so avoidance becomes the strategy.