SalesScore

When you negotiate with yourself on any issues, which involve the sales process, you are creating your own roadblocks, stalls and objections. That’s right. You’re preventing yourself from making a sale. Your prospects aren’t doing it. You are.

Here’s some of the conversation you may have with yourself which indicates you are carrying this baggage:

• “They surely won’t pay our price.”
• “I must call on certain people in the organization and never call on others.”
• “I can’t make calls on Friday afternoon.”
• “I can’t schedule sales appointments for Monday morning.”
• “We’re not competitive.”
• “I can’t get to the decision-makers.”
• “I can’t make a sale without making a top-notch presentation.”
• “They’re going to need time to think it over in order to make a decision.”
• “They’ll never share their budget with me.”
• “I can’t get past the gatekeepers.”
• “They have no reason to be lying to me.”
• “Even if I don’t win this deal, if I’m a nice guy, I stand a chance of doing business in the future.”

Undoubtedly in sales, your prospects will create stalls and objections, which are real.  Begin to eliminate the stalls and objections, which you are creating for yourself.  Start by taking some time to reflect on all the different ways you may be negotiating with yourself.

Let’s assume you consider yourself a very knowledgeable and savvy consumer – you do a lot of research before you make a major purchase. You like to compare and shop for price. You’ll clip coupons; you’re more than willing to ask for a discount; and you like to inform salespeople they are in fierce competition with someone else for your business. Congratulations, you’re one shrewd consumer!

The way you buy products and services, as individuals, will have a direct correlation or effect on how you allow your prospects to buy products and services from you.   If the sales process for buying a $500 TV takes you over a week, image how long you are allowing your prospects to “think it over” when you are selling products or services over five grand?

Don’t let your buying traits become your selling habits.

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Discussing a product or service price can be a difficult topic for some.  Sharing the cost of an item is much like telling your friends what you received on a test you took in grade school.  You only want to tell them if you received a high score.  If you had a low score on the test, more than likely you avoided the question or even lied.

Now that you are in the professional world, companies flourish in their industry by revenue.  To me, money then is a very important subject.  If your sales team struggles to identify a prospect’s budget, how can sales be closed quickly and efficiently?  By discussing money upfront, you can avoid the long sales cycle.

The next time you are interviewing sales reps, listen for them to discuss the compensation plan.  This will be a good indicator as to whether or not they understand the importance of money.

There is an unspoken, emotional need for approval, and all of us want to be liked.  Whether that is from colleagues or associates, no one wants to be perceived as a jerk.

So how can having a need for approval become a negative attribute of the sales cycle?

Sales reps can focus more on the building the relationship than listening for problems.  It isn’t about being liked in sales.  It is about trust and respect, and there is a huge difference.  Sales reps with a high need for approval can fail to ask some of the more difficult qualifying questions.

Hearing no for some people can be scary, but in reality hearing “no” can be a good thing because it may shed light on issues that need to be followed with more questions.

The good news is that the need for approval can be overcome by role separation.  This happens when someone consciously separates themselves as who they are as a person and who they are as a sales rep.  This is somewhat like acting, and this can mentally prepare people to get over the hump of needing approval.

Negative thoughts, fears, rejections, and failures are the nemeses of any sales rep.  Too often, sales reps become caught in a mind trap of record collection that can limit their belief in achieving realistic goals.

Think of it this way: If you have a cup of poisonous water filled to the brim, would you flush out the poison by adding more water before you take a drink?  Of course not!  You would pour out the polluted water, clean the cup, and then refill the cup with pure, clean H2O.

However, when we don’t clear our mind, we continue to “poison” our belief system and begin struggling to succeed in our sales goals. Does the following sound familiar?

• I don’t know how to talk to the president of a company.
• My sales cycle is too long to make any money.
• No one wants to listen to me over the phone.
• I don’t have enough time to prospect new leads.
• The competition is too tough.
• No one is buying in this economy.
• Selling is not a fun game.

This is head trash! These thoughts and ideas make up our belief system, which leads to how we create a daily plan-of-action.

Every sales rep has at least 60 beliefs that make up their sales thought process.  Listen for negative comments you or other sales reps are saying.  On average, a bad sales rep can have 10 or more self-limiting record collections.

Think about how much more effective a sales rep would be just by emptying out the head trash and refilling the mind with positive energy!

If you were asked in an interview how much money you make, do you share this information openly?  If you are buying a car and the sales rep asks you what your budget is, do you tell him?   If you answered “no” to either one of these questions, it is possible that you may be uncomfortable talking about money.

As a sales rep, do you ask prospects about their budget?  If the buyer does not reveal their budget, do you keep asking questions to uncover how much they want to spend or do you believe that its best not to discuss it further.

If you find yourself avoiding the “money issue,” this could be a sign that you feel money is a private issue.  Where would this belief come from?  Perhaps by the way you were raised?  It’s possible that you were taught that discussing money is not polite.

Sales reps that avoid discussions about money may ultimately miss out on closing valuable business.  When a buyer says, “I can’t afford it at this time” or “this isn’t in our budget for this year,”  don’t believe it.  If they really need or want your product or services, they will come up with the money.  It’s your role as a sales rep to find out “why” they want to buy.  Find the emotional “pain” and money no longer becomes an issue.

So I ask, what’s money got to do with it?

Be nice. Play nice. Act nice. Nice has many slightly different interpretations, including accommodating, friendly, pleasant, good, and polite. We’re taught from a young age that nice is a good thing. So why might being a “nice guy” not be a good aspect of a sales process?

During the critical rapport stage, we salespeople strive to be friendly and to find points of commonality with a prospect.  At this point, “nice” needs to make a transformation to establish and maintain trust and respect.  A sale is about solving a problem and filling a need.  Sales is not about making anyone look or feel good, becoming friends or buddies in an effort to win  approval.  There is not a “nice guy” contest or prize a salesperson wants to win.  Nice guys are often time wasters for prospects because they can spend entire appointments joking and talking about the Super Bowl (or kids, or cars, or vacations…) and leave prospects wondering about the purpose of the meeting. Yet ”nice guys”  leave the meeting feeling great because they made a new friend.

Establishing trust and respect requires honesty, curiosity, good listening skills, problem solving, and the ability to ask sometimes difficult questions to uncover pain.  Nice guys frequently dislike pain because the feeling is uncomfortable and sometimes scary, yet pain is an essential step in making a sale.  Nice guy mentality is often superficial, while trust and respect are multifaceted and deep.

Nice guys can be transformed with sales training, practice, self-confidence, and a list of pain questions, but this process takes commitment, professionalism, and an effort to emotionally detach. Separating your personal identity from your role as a sales rep helps, especially when at heart, you really are a nice guy.

It’s Tuesday afternoon and your best salesperson just submitted her two week notice because she’s moving to Arizona.  Why didn’t she warn you? Doesn’t she know you’re in the middle of your busiest quarter in three years?

You haven’t needed to hire someone for at least six months and it took you months to train them but you don’t have time to do that now. Plus, you don’t have a hiring process anyway. You were blessed last time with a referral from a fellow business owner.

Panic sets in and you begin to ask yourself, “Who do I know?” but you come up blank and start asking current employees who they know.  You find the three year old job description in the back of your desk drawer and post it on the fridge in the break room.

Great news! Your office manager’s brother in law might is between jobs (his unemployment is about to run out) and he sold knives and magazine subscriptions in college (12 years ago.)  You meet with him and spend 40 minutes talking about his last four jobs, his goal to make $100K next year, and the recent high school football game where his kid plays cornerback.  “It’s better than someone unknown,” you think.  You can train him! He’s a nice guy!

This, my friend, is the WRONG person for the job! And you know it.  You just don’t have the extra time, energy, and possibly money needed to find Mr. or Ms. Right.  In a nutshell, you’re doomed until you can stop, gather information and put together a plan.

So where do you start?  You need sage advice and possibly some help – but from where? An experienced business coach or business mentor can provide objectivity, a fresh perspective and possibly referrals to resources. Ideally, you need someone who specializes in RPO (recruitment, process, outsourcing.)  In the meantime, put together a list of key skills and behaviors required for the job, think about the ideal kind of person to fill it, and look over your budget to see what level of employee you can afford. This at least provides some guidelines and a starting point.  Hiring the wrong person even with the right intentions will usually come back to bite you.