What you can do about it.

Are your salespeople less successful today than in previous years?  Do you need to capture a larger percentage of your market share?   Let’s face some brutal facts:

• Unemployment is up.
• Employers are pressuring employees to conserve cash.
• Buyers are more fearful to make investments than in previous years. 
• Credit is tight.
• Risk aversion rules the day.

This all spells one thing for sellers in today’s market—Much more REJECTION.

If you industry or market is down and you don’t want to go down with it, you MUST increase your market share.  A higher percentage IS there for the taking, but only if you make the changes required to capture it.

Many salespeople (and selling principals) possess limiting traits that are hidden during more prosperous times.  These weaknesses can be devastating during a weak economy.  Some of the most dangerous are:

• Fear of Rejection
• Need For Approval
• Emotional Involvement

Here’s an example:

John was asked by one of his “hot prospects” to call him back on Tuesday.  Responsible John did just that, but the prospect wasn’t available.  The phantom suspect had cancelled a previous appointment.  John was getting vague responses regarding a re-schedule and was feeling a blow-off coming.  He is now mired in paralysis.  He wants to write an email and begins spending hours of time and energy asking co-workers what it should say.  All this time can be spent finding new opportunities, improving his pipeline, collecting referrals and growing sales, but the soap opera proceeds anyway.   John’s emotional involvement is not only wasting time and effecting John, but also the morale of other employees.  Why does this happen and what can you do about it?

Let’s get to some root causes:  

1. ALL salespeople get rejected.  The costs to your business are never due to rejection or to the fear the rejection.  They are due to how long it will take salespeople to recover from them. 

2.  John’s need for approval has him so twisted up about the prospect’s response to the email, that he wastes massive effort creating and agonizing over the actual wording.  “Will the prospect still like me if I send this?”  If John recovered from rejection quicker, his need for approval may not have been triggered. 

If John didn’t possess this pervasive rejection weakness, he would do what successful salespeople do–deal with the cancellation on the phone, in the moment.   He could have avoided wheel spinning and rescheduled or ended the “opportunity” right then and there.  But even without the rejection problem, his requirement for approval may have prevented John from confronting the suspect fearing he would be offended and go away.

So John wastes a day on an email to a person that would likely disappear anyway.  Sound familiar?  If not, congratulations, because this happens many thousands of times each day.

You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See 

The good news is that the limited traits described above (as well as others) can all be objective predicted with great accuracy.  They can also be remedied, resulting in greater market share, more consistency and dramatically improved performance.  If you would like to receive a complimentary assessment that will rank the performance of your Sales Force, click the button below and insert “Z3 Performance Development” on line 26.

Happy Selling…

Joe

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