When to blame your attitude for missing targets

If you’re consistently not meeting your targets, chances are, there are gaps in your basic selling skills. FOTOSEARCH 

By John Kageche

In Summary

• It is easy for the salesperson to believe he is not the problem. He knows! And because he knows he cannot be told. He tells! And because he tells he does not listen. And he doesn’t listen because, you guessed it, he knows! And so the vicious cycle continues.

Many are the times that the salesperson that has many misses and rare hits is told by others: “It’s not you; it’s the prospects that don’t have money” or, “it’s the economy that’s bad.” I don’t agree; maybe it is you.

Let’s go back to the basics, which is what one should do when they find themselves in this sales quandary.

If you’re consistently not meeting your targets, chances are, there are gaps in your basic selling skills. Sometimes, when a salesperson is on a roll with consistent sales, it gets to his head and he believes it happened because of his “greatness”— he forgets that it is the result of a concerted building of momentum along the sales cycle.

And when the momentum stops building, the sales wane. Full of himself, he may be easily convinced that the many misses are due to the conditions of the market and not his defective sales methods.

Regardless of where one’s sales numbers are, it’s important for all salespeople to take an occasional break to review the basics of good selling behaviours.

Let’s look at the sales cycle again. Google reminds us that the steps along which the selling process follows are prospect, interview, demonstrate, validate, negotiate, close, referral and back again to prospect.

Simple though these steps sound, even the best get thrown off track sometimes. And sales is unforgiving—as this column has repeatedly averred, sales is perhaps the only job in which what you do when no-one is looking will come to reward you or haunt you; either way it will show in your results.

When a salesperson doesn’t regularly prospect with a view to increasing the quality and quantity of his prospects he misses a core basic step and he can only stagger and fall thereafter.

Staggering begins when he does not make enough calls, and therefore doesn’t make enough appointments, nor presentations—the natural consequence for this is that he gets less closes. Soon enough, he falls.

A research done to determine if there was any other way to increase closes returned a sound verdict—the only way to increase closes is to see more people and increase the quality of the people you see. Adequate prospecting (the never ending art of looking for people to buy your product or service) is the number one basic.

Trying to beat the system because no one is looking, serves only to backfire on the salesperson.

Another basic. Salespeople regularly shoot themselves in the foot by failing to understand their customer’s business, not listening to their client’s needs, or asking the right questions.

“The prospects don’t know what they want” they reason. But before you pass judgment, are the prospects who don’t know what they want, buying the same product you are selling, but elsewhere?

You may have degenerated to being a run-of-the mill salesperson. You don’t research your client and so make generic presentations; you don’t seek to inform subsequent presentations with experiences from past ones; you don’t rehearse presentations you are going to make because, after all, you reason, the prospect needs my product like they do oxygen and so you carry yourself with indifference to the prospect and your language and your attire follow suit.

It is easy for the salesperson to believe he is not the problem. He knows! And because he knows he cannot be told. He tells! And because he tells he does not listen. And he doesn’t listen because, you guessed it, he knows! And so the vicious cycle continues.