Sales managers pay a high price for failing to develop their teams' skills. Not only are they selling less than they could, but they are also forced to sell at lower prices than they should.
One of the reasons for this situation is the increasing specialisation of purchasing departments, which employ highly qualified professionals trained in a new “form of torture” : putting the seller in a critical situation and squeezing until the entire margin has been reduced to the maximum. Feeling like a commodity is unpleasant and is totally demotivating for any professional salesperson.
However, the real problem is not in the most prepared client and in their processes and purchasing departments, it is in the fact that there are few people in the sales departments who are true professionals . The approach, attitude, mentality and behavior are what is called into question among those, wrongly called , salespeople. As long as they continue to be perceived as simple salesmen of basic products instead of consultants who help solve problems by creating value, it will be very difficult for them to get beyond a pyrrhic sale, with almost no margin and little value. For that reason, we must go back to the basics .
1. Salespeople who live in reactive mode are late to opportunities.
One of the biggest underminers of sales performance is being perceived as late to a sales opportunity . This is because sales managers and directors allow their teams to spend too much time operating in reactive vp technical email lists mode. Salespeople wait for leads, wait for customers to knock on the door or contact them on the phone, as if the customer’s job is to raise their hand. At most… they send an email hoping that the unlikely response will put them back on the path to finding that lead. In the end, there is little more than waiting , waiting , and waiting .
There are many reasons why salespeople are the last to arrive at the opportunity to close the deal. There are various theories, increasingly supported, that argue that proactive prospecting is dead. According to these opinions, it is argued that it is very fruitless to pursue a potential client who is not in active listening mode or, even, that he is not the one who comes to you. It is also argued that today's buyer spends much more time on the dark side of the funnel . However, we should not confuse the necessary exercise of prospecting with wasting resources , without sense, without a head and without a minimum exercise of initial prior research. What does not make sense is to dedicate prospecting efforts to those target accounts that, at a glance, we know - or everything leads us to think - that they will not buy from us (because they are with the competition, because they are in a financially compromised situation, because they do not have the need that our offer solves or, sometimes as simple, because they do not know of the existence of our solution). This is where prospecting is combined with doing a good selection of accounts and target clients , on the one hand, and with correctly conveying the message and value proposition, on the other.
I must say that not prospecting and waiting for potential clients to contact you is not the solution. It is not that I completely disagree, it is that I also consider it to be a lie and it is not the practice to follow when we talk about selling between organizations. The modern B2B seller must have, among his different skills, a highly developed prospecting capacity . The problem is not only that there is little prospecting, but that what there is is of poor quality and feeds lazy sellers, those who feel more comfortable waiting for their buyer to come looking for them and that, unfortunately, does not happen in the real world!
Whether it's because they heed bad recommendations, or because they don't receive adequate training and follow-up, or because they get used to bad work habits, the end result is always the same. Reactive salespeople are late to sales opportunities . And when they realize it, when they begin to be aware of the need to get involved, they are too far away. The purchasing criteria have already been defined, the conditions of the proposal have been defined, and, once again, we are not the chosen option.
And what usually happens is no different than what has happened on other occasions… when they get to that sales opportunity, they find more proactive competitors, those who got there first, those who established stronger relationships with the buyer, those who defined themselves even before building the solution for the need raised. It is from that position, from that of consultant, from the proactive attitude of helping to define the solution, sharing ideas and helping to define the requirements that the seller must meet, that the real sales opportunity is built .
This implies that as sellers we have arrived late to the opportunity and that leads us to the position of “bad seller” .
It is very difficult for us to be seen as the consultant who must create value when we are not able to reach the point in time to resolve the need of our potential client.
Furthermore, it is not easy to admit that the competitor who has gotten ahead of us may have done so because they have reached the opportunity earlier by acting proactively.
Rare are the situations in which the proposal or solution is completely different from ours. Also rare are the cases in which the price is the only differential (although the purchasing department would like to make us believe that it is). The differential element is arriving on time or arriving late and, generally, from this position the only thing that can “save” that seller is a price so low that it can catch the buyer’s attention. If that is the strategy you want to follow… the impact on the profit and loss account can be disastrous.
2. Sellers who rely entirely on their product become a commodity.
As if that were not enough, in addition to being late, many salespeople reduce their effectiveness when they focus their value exclusively on the product and not on how to solve the customer's problem. They are poorly prepared, poorly trained or lacking sufficient skills to build a true value proposition. They highlight all the features of their product and make it the most relevant part of the conversation. The consequences of acting in this way are dramatic: the salesperson focuses on themselves, on their product, and is more concerned about what they sell than about the customer's problems and needs.
Thinking about your product and not the real need to be solved is a selfish message that conveys selfishness and no concern for the problem the customer needs to solve.
When salespeople focus only on the product, it is impossible for them to perceive you as a trusted consultant or advisor because it conveys that the salesperson is focusing on the product – on their own problem – and not on the needs of the client – the problem to be solved. In the end, this way of acting is reduced to offering the client a benchmarking of features vs. price (we are not even talking about functionalities) in which one competitor is compared to another, but where nothing is said about added value. Those salespeople who act like this live for the product and die for the product. Their contribution of value is null and the message they transmit is: “I am one more” .
3. Salespeople who make ineffective, amateurish sales calls are dooming themselves as exclusive product pitchmen.
Who is responsible for guiding the way sales calls are made? Much of today's sales training focuses on very general theories, on very global aspects of the sales process. Many blogs and LinkedIn posts talk about social selling , the importance of content, etc., and without leaving them aside we must, once again, go back to the basics .
