If your salespeople are like most, they love to do things that allow them to:

• live inside their comfort zone
• feel like experts
• have fun
• feel in control
• feel smart or important
• avoid rejection

In order to accomplish this, they choose to spend their time:

• talking about your company
• talking about themselves
• giving demos
• presenting
• burning up company resources
• dropping names
• creating and offering proposals (often multiple times to the same prospect!)
• offering references

Unfortunately, these behaviors will cost you big bucks, especially when deployed prematurely. 

Premature Satisfaction will never:

• serve to build trust
• accelerate sales cycles
• create positive differentiation
• uncover the compelling reasons that a decision maker would buy
• help one discover if or when they might do business with your company 

To worsen things, most salespeople just can’t wait to begin wasting time with Satisfaction as early as possible in the sales cycle in order to “feel the love”.  If you are still wondering if members of your sales team might be satisfying prematurely, evidence will reside in the reliability and believe-ability of your monthly sales forecasts. 

To improve your effectiveness and revenues, you need to ask your salespeople to immediately:

• take a step back to breath deep – haste makes waste
• commit to being trustworthy and sincerely interested
• focus upon understanding personal reasons for buying
• commit to becoming infinitely curious
• care
• ask more questions than everyone else
• ask more insightful questions than everyone else
• ask tougher questions than everyone else
• listen actively
• be authentic
• never make assumptions
• commit to continuous improvement in all of the above
• master the psychology of cooperation versus the manipulation of traditional selling

For further help or to request a simple UnCommon Sense Sales Upgrade checklist, click here.

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2010.   All Rights Reserved.

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