Here are three more stories high-performing salespeople never tell themselves.
By Phil Krone, President
Last week, we referenced Joe Hoyle, a professor at the University of Richmond: “We are all human. We tend to focus on what we think are our weaknesses. Change the story you are telling yourself and you’ll change your life.” Hoyle essentially said that we need to tell better stories about ourselves to ourselves—in other words, we need to change the way we see ourselves. We provided three examples of stories we’ve heard sales reps tell themselves that held back sales.
But simply telling yourself a different story isn’t enough. There might be something in what you do that needs to change, too. Often, it’s the sales process, which is also part of your story. Here are three more stories of what salespeople told themselves that held back sales.
“We know you won’t place all of this with one source. We would be happy to get even a piece of the project.”
I was in a final meeting with a prospect about to place a major government contract. The engineer making the call with me believed the buyer wouldn’t place all of the business with one source. He wanted the buyer to know we would be happy even if we were given only part of the project. In other words, we would settle for less. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing so I looked at the buyer and said, “That’s his view, not the company’s: We want the entire project.” We then used the FOCIS® discovery process to learn what this prospect cared about most and how he valued it. That information allowed us to link the prospect’s needs to the product we were selling. The FOCIS® discovery process teaches sellers to be persuasive by asking the right questions at the right time and customizing them for each prospect.
“We have called on that firm for 15 years. They never give us more than a few minutes, and we will never get business from them.”
The story my client, an investment advisory firm, told itself (and me) was that its chances of getting business from one of its prospects were basically nil. Their prospect offered solid upside, but my client never got more than 10 minutes with him, perhaps due to the prospect’s apparent ADHD and short attention span. The prospect was a consultant to large retirement funds, and his business would be a decided plus for our client.
Having little expectation of moving the needle, my client nevertheless asked me to call on the prospect with its management team. I said, “Yes, but I need to spend some time with you before our meeting” so that we could decide how to customize the sales process we had created together over the past three months. We selected what we thought would be the best questions we could ask to quickly capture the interest of the prospect, especially in light of his ADHD. By sharing our questions with the prospect at the outset of the meeting, we were then able to pull him in with our consultative sales process, FOCIS®. I stopped the resulting meeting after two hours because I felt we had built the case for awarding us the business. Two weeks later, the formerly elusive prospect sent our client a check for millions of dollars to manage on its behalf.
“Our sales cycle is a year, and we have never been able to shorten it.”
This client had a “milk run” of auto dealerships that they would call on monthly. They would drop off donuts with the service manager with the idea that they would build a relationship over time. The strategy was based on getting to know the prospect so well—or, rather, that the prospect would get to know them so well—that eventually he would buy a case of their product. At dinner the night before our FOCIS® selling training began, I said there was no reason their sales cycle couldn’t be one or two calls, or a month or two total. The product was a pure commodity. We helped them reposition the product in a way that created unique value for the prospect. In other words, we created a new sales process that reduced the length of the sales cycle significantly. The first time they used the new sales process they called on the dealership’s owner and service manager together and made a 40-case sale on the first sales call! The company has grown 20 percent a year with strong margins ever since.
Would you like to talk about your story, or get more details on one of the stories we told? Just call me at 847.446.0008 X 1.