You Will Close. You Will Sell. You Will Have a Good Attitude!
The last time I was employed in high tech I worked for a company full of good people, with an excellent product, that solved a crap load of problems most large firms didn’t even know they had!
I mean this stuff was Da Bomb! It was slick, had blinky blue lights, was streamlined compared to the competition and ran circles around them in head to head comparisons.
There was only one problem: getting anyone to listen to the presentation. If someone would listen to the presentation we were golden because we had good stuff. In fact, the entire week of training for new sales people was geared around mastering the presentation, which assumed, of course, we had a meeting with a decision-maker.
At the end of the training I asked the then (now, not-suprisingly-downsized) VP of Sales how we got the meeting in the first place. He cocked his head, raised his eyebrows, cleared his throat, looked over at the lady in charge of operations and said, “Laura, how would you answer that?”
As it turned out, this fancy gear didn’t sell itself. Marketing couldn’t generate leads. The inside sales staff was completely incompetent and couldn’t even set an appointment with an UN-qualified prospect, let alone a qualified prospect and it didn’t matter what my “goal sheet” said, or how good my “attitude” was or what my “belief system” was I was not going to make the arbitrarily-assigned quota with the product-training-disguised-as-sales-training they put me through.
Without understanding who bought this gear, why they bought it, why they wouldn’t buy it, how to handle receptionists and assistants and technical buyers and financial buyers and executives and end-users and how to pique the interests of senior staff so they INVITED me in for a meeting with a mutually-agreed upon Agenda I was TOAST!
But the sales managers didn’t know the answers to these questions. These were suit-wearing, Merlot-drinking, Miller-Heiman-following, high-brow dudes who were well-versed on the whole “consultative selling” lexicon but couldn’t SET an appointment to save their humidors and wine coolers.
However, they had a quota handed down from on high and bye-golly, they weren’t going to back down from that number. So they brought on headcount, divided the quota by the number of people they hired, gave us some product and pitch-delivery training and turned us loose.
Therein lies the problem and the key to sales manager development: teach them to manage the BEHAVIOR of their sales people and then pay on results. But if you polled 100 sales managers I’d bet you $1,000 that you wouldn’t get 10 that give an intriguing USP (Unique Selling Proposition), or a captivating “elevator pitch” or ask even one question of a CEO that would make her say, “Huh, that’s a great question. Call my office tomorrow to set up a time to get together and discuss that in more detail.”
Until you master these abilities and teach your sales people to do the same and then hold them accountable to do it daily you’ll struggle with sales management development, you’ll have poor sales results, you’ll miss quotas, suffer high turnover in your sales staff and basically scratch your head bald.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Call me today and I’ll help you keep your hair, your office, your house and grow your profit margins and market share while your competition calls Joe Biden’s doctor for hair plugs and extensions.
Remember, Life is good. It’s “Gooder” When You’re Selling.
