Salespeople Create Their Own Problems
One reason many salespeople continually experience problems is that they believe and behave as if every potential customer (prospect) is automatically qualified to do business with them. Clearly this is nonsense, as the prospect may have no needs, no pains, no budget, no good reason to make changes, can’t or won’t make the decision and frankly may well have other priorities in mind.
So what is the problem, is it poor salesmanship, or perhaps the salesperson is just attempting to sell to someone who simply isn’t qualified to be his customer? I would say it’s both, but the biggest issue is that the salesperson has not done the groundwork, so has no option but to attempt to sell to unqualified prospects. This is always going to make the salesperson’s life very hard, and sadly the salesperson has no one to blame other than himself.
So what could our salesperson do differently? Picture a sausage making machine if you can…. the raw ingredients go in at one end, and the finished sausages come out at the other. The quality of the sausages will be influenced by the quality of the raw ingredients, whereas the quantity of sausages will be determined by the amount of raw materials fed into the sausage machine. Now if our salesperson could visualise his sales process as a sausage machine, then clearly what he puts in will influence what comes out. If he puts poorly qualified prospects into the sausage machine, then he will end up working very hard for little results. Conversely, if he was to develop a proper sales prospecting process, and consequently only put quality prospects into the sausage machine, then lo and behold he will find himself working with highly qualified prospects, thus making his life easier, more efficient and profitable.
Sales prospecting, normally in the form of cold calls and networking is the unseen hard work which must be done, before we can sit down with properly qualified prospects and start selling for real. Sales prospecting should be an active process, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can also be extremely uncomfortable. It’s primarily this discomfort and a fear of rejection that prevents people from doing it properly, and so they make selling very hard for themselves and essentially create their own problems by not doing the necessary groundwork.