Problem: Jason was new to the company and was trying to develop his territory. He didn’t lack enthusiasm and was making his objective of 100 cold phone calls a day. He felt pretty good about that since he saw others make far less. But still, he was not making nearly enough appointments to keep his pipeline filled and wondered how he was ever going to achieve his income goals if things didn’t change.
Problem: One of the biggest challenges that salespeople face is getting appointments. People are constantly bombarded by marketing messages via the media enticing them to purchase. Prospects receive daily calls from salespeople who want to see them, so it’s no wonder that they treat most requests for meetings with skepticism and suspicion. This unfortunate fact of life makes the salesperson’s job that much more difficult.
Problem: One of the most common objections salespeople get is about price: “That’s a bit more than we were thinking about paying.” “Your prices are kind of high.” “That just doesn’t fit our budget” are typical comments. Salespeople tend to be very aggressive in their attempts to overcome price objections and begin dropping their price to get the sale. And, more often than not, once the price issue has been “resolved,” another objection comes to the surface. Sometimes it seems to be a never-ending circle of objections from the prospect.
Problem: Sara was becoming increasingly frustrated in her efforts to reach the decision makers when she was prospecting. Time after time access was blocked by the gatekeepers and information gatherers. It often seemed like there was a conspiracy to keep her from speaking to the top-level people. She had tried various tactics, but nothing was working. Now her sales were suffering.
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: The following frustration was shared with me by a salesperson the other day. “I reached out to 57 potential prospects this week and only 8 of them gave me the time I needed to tell them what I do. The rest of them said they were busy and didn’t have time to talk. I have been taught that prospects are concerned that salespeople will take up too much of their time so I always ask if they have a few minutes to talk. What do I have to do to earn a minute of time?”
Problem: Jeremy had been selling for 15 years and was feeling a little frustrated lately. He honestly evaluated his job in sales and figured out that there were some things about selling that he really hated. Top on the list were: chasing prospects who don’t return calls, wasting time doing proposals and presentations for prospects who shop around, always having to work hard to convince prospects, dealing with resistance, and handling constant rejection.
Problem: Casey had made a presentation to a large shipyard that had been awarded the contract to build one of the Navy’s newest amphibious ships. This was an important deal for his company, a seven-figure sale over the next two years. Casey knew that he was the front-runner and, if the company did not accept his proposal, another six months would be wasted because the engineering drawings would have to be revised. He knew that this presented an unacceptable situation for the shipyard. Nevertheless, the buyer was stalling him on making a decision. Casey had tried everything to get them to make a move, but to no avail. And to make matters worse, he was getting the feeling that if he continued to be assertive in pushing for a decision, he might hurt the rapport that he’d worked so hard to establish. Have you ever been in this position?
Problem: “What am I doing here?” Robert said to himself. He was twenty minutes into the initial meeting with this prospect, and he was clearly fighting an uphill battle. All his attempts to develop rapport were met with apathetic, almost frigid responses. His questions, simple and innocuous though they were, received little more than one or two word responses. “What’s going on here?” he wondered. This guy won’t even crack a smile and yet he gave me the appointment. Is he just having a bad day, or do I have a hygiene problem? He just couldn’t figure it out, yet he kept at it, trying to pump some life into this dying appointment. He wanted to quit, but his ego wouldn’t let him; he felt he should be able to breathe some life into this situation.
Problem: Steve called us the other day, frustrated with what he called the usual “end of the quarter scramble.” In an effort to make their numbers at the end of every quarter, his reps were resorting more and more to pricing concessions to get business closed. What was worse, Steve felt that many of his company’s customers had begun to expect these discounts and were waiting until the end of the quarter to place all but their most critical orders. In the last several quarters, nearly 60% of their deals were closed in the last week of the quarter and the trend was getting worse. The results were becoming disastrous to the bottom line and Steve usually had no idea of whether his group was going to make quota.