AMI - Eight Biggest Reasons Salespeople Don't Produce Article 11

Eight Biggest Reasons Salespeople Don't Produce
Article 11

By Terry Booton, President
Advanced Marketing Instruction

Having been in sales, sales management, sales consulting, sales training and coaching salespeople for over 30 years, I have spent most of my career in the technology industry of which 18 of those years were with IBM. For the past 13 years, I have had my own sales consulting and sales training business and have spent a considerable amount of time coaching and making sales calls with salespeople.

During this time I have pinpointed eight major reasons why salespeople don't produce to their maximum potential. These reasons apply not only to new salespeople, but to senior salespeople with twenty to thirty years of experience.

This article is the first of a series of eight that highlights the reasons salespeople are not as productive as they could be and what can be done to correct the situation.

The first biggest reason for lack of productivity is that the salesperson does not call high enough in the organization. Many salespeople try to make their sale with lower level people in the organization rather than calling on the top decision maker. To clarify, when I am speaking of the top decision maker it may or may not be the CEO or president, although one should try to focus at that level in the beginning. It could be a Divisional Vice President, or plant manager in a larger corporation. The criteria used for identifying the top decision maker is the person who can or will make the ultimate decision and sign the check. This person can come up with the money even if your offer is not in the budget. For this to happen, you are usually talking about the president of the company. If you are calling on a smaller account, you can be sure the owner or president will be making any major decision regarding technology or services, especially if it changes the way they do business.

Many of the prospects salespeople are calling on are only trying to gather information and will never make a decision. Many of them are recommenders and not buyers. The salesperson can not afford to waste time in today's market with a bottoms up selling strategy. Today, it cost over $500 to make an industrial sales call on the average and 6 calls to close a new account. At this rate, you know you will have a selling expense of no less than $3000.

Think about you cost of a sale when you get involved in a major project. How many major projects have you been involved in or how many Request For Proposal's have you responded to and nothing ever happens? Had you made your call at the top before engagement, you may have found this was never going to be a live project anyway and could have saved yourself thousands of dollars in the first place in selling and marketing expenses.

If you don't call at the top, your sales cycle will be longer, less product and services will be sold. Many times the sale will not happen because you are trying to sell a product or service because that is how you are compensated rather than trying to solve a business issue.

The major reason most salespeople will not call at the top is because of their lack the confidence to call on the C-level positions and feel more comfortable dealing at lower levels in the organization. The salesperson is paid to sell product or services and they feel more comfortable talking to people who want to talk about the technology rather than talking to the business issues.

If you are trying to sell a service, I believe you need to get away from the IT people and make those calls at the top of the organization having a business discussion rather than trying to have that discussion with someone in an IT position, whether it be a project manager, IT, data processing director, CTO or even the CIO because of the different levels of interest.

How many times have you spent days, weeks or months trying to get a deal closed and when the person you are working with takes it forward, the project gets killed. Would it not have made more sense to have made your initial call on that person in the first place to determine if there was a real opportunity there?

If your product or service changes the way a company does business, you can be assured the president or CEO will most likely be involved in that decision. So, why not start there? You need to get your sales team comfortable with selling to the C-level and feeling comfortable in having a business discussion rather than a technical discussion. You will sell more business using this approach. This is an area where advanced selling techniques and sales training will pay off.

This article is the second of a series of eight that highlights the reasons salespeople are not as productive as they could be and what can be done to correct the situation.

The second reason that salespeople are not productive is that they are not selling to the business issues. They will go into an account and immediately start trying to sell their product or service without ever knowing if there is even a requirement for their product or service. When this happens, it is an immediate turnoff to most buyers, especially at top level positions in a company.

Many salespeople will go in and start selling their company. This is not the right approach. An executive is not interested in knowing about your company until he or she first understands if there is even a need for what you are selling. If he or she has a need, you can then start selling them as to why they should be doing business with your company.

Many salespeople will go in and start talking about everything except why they are there. They run out of time and the executive is off to another meeting. When this happens, you have most likely lost your chance to get back with this person because you have not shown them any value as to why you were there and why they should meet with you again.

If a salesperson will just go in ask, "What are the three biggest issues you are having to deal with right now, they are likely to find a window of opportunity for their product or service offering.

They need to first understand why it is an issue, what the person is doing about it, what is it costing them not to get the issue resolved and if they would consider your help in resolving the issue if in fact you have a solution to the problem.

Many salespeople think you have to know everything about a business before you make an executive level call, but actually you do not. What they expect you to know is something about the industry and how your company's products and services resolve some of these issues they are faced with.

There is a big difference in having product knowledge and selling skill knowledge. Therefore, you need to teach your sales team how to focus on how to have discussions relating to business issues and let the technical people focus more on the product issues. The salesperson can actually the product while knowing very little about the product.

Over the years, I have sold a lot of product and knew little about it but understood how the product could solve a business issues.

This article is the third of a series of eight that highlights the reasons salespeople are not as productive as they could be and what can be done to correct the situation.

The third reason salespeople are not productive is that they are not asking the right questions and the real questions they are missing out on are the qualifying questions.

When making calls with salespeople, they will ask a high level and very broad surface type question and never drill down with more penetrating and detailed questions. For example, many salespeople will go in and make the statement, "We specialize in infrastructure." The response may be, "We are already working with a company that does infrastructure." The rep may tell the prospect to give him a call if things don't work out and leave. They never stop to ask exactly what type of infrastructure projects they are working on or have capabilities to address. With all the different type of infrastructure issues that can be addressed, you will not find a company that does them all. This rep may have offered infrastructure products and services that the incumbent did not offer and as a result, left money on the table for someone else.

The salesperson needs to put themselves in the role of being a detective and focus on asking leading questions. Keep drilling down until they find the answers they are looking for or have a full understanding of the issues. The second reason that salespeople are not productive is that they are not selling to the business issues and relating to the prospect how their product or service will resolve those issues.

Most salespeople I work with have no idea of the IT budget for their largest accounts. They have no idea how the budget is allocated to hardware, software, services, communications, payroll, etc. In many cases, if the salesperson asked the right questions, they would find they are getting only 5% of the business opportunity. There may be another 95% going to some other competitor.

The salesperson may be focused on only one or two projects, but if they ask the right questions, they may find there are several projects on the backburner to be addressed. There was one account where the sales rep was focused on one big project and when I asked the CIO if there were any projects in his backlog, he told me he had 340 projects to get to that the rep was not aware of. That rep had nothing better to do than camp out at that account for the next year. If he got only 10% of the opportunity that would be 34 projects and that was most likely more than his company could handle at any one time.

The key question to ask on any call is, "If you could solve this problem of have the ability to do this, would you spend the money to make it happen? Especially, if there was a Return on Investment?" If the answer is no, move on. If yes, then you need to figure out how to make it happen.

This article is the fourth of a series of eight that highlights the reasons salespeople are not as productive as they could be and what can be done to correct the situation.

The fourth reason salespeople are not productive is that they are not organized. They do not sit down and plan out their day the night before or their week the week before.

In many cases, they don't lay out their activities to where they may be executed in a chronological order in order to maximize their time, energy and effort. They will hop scotch around and waste a lot of productive time.

Many reps are not prepared to make a call. Rather than anticipate what they may need to have available to them during the call, they will have to go back to the office and get back to the person at a later date. This is non productive time spent that could have been avoided if thought through and this usually drags out of the sale cycle.

Many times remote reps will drive from one town to the next rather than setting up multiple calls for the day in the same town thus trading valuable selling time to wasted windshield time. Many sales reps will start their day at Starbucks trying to figure out who to call to try to set up their next appointment.

Because many reps fail to ask the right questions and gain a full understanding of the customer requirements, they have to constantly rework the configurations, which is time consuming and costly to the company.

Another productivity problem is the lack of territory management skills. This is how they organize a territory or account and systematically devise a way to not only cover their existing accounts but a systematic way to penetrate new opportunities in the territory or account.

Salespeople should have a written marketing plan as to how they are going to meet their quota objective with detailed steps to make it happen. If they don't have a road map, it is very hard to get organized and stay focused.

Many salespeople say that 90% of everything they do during the course of the day has nothing to do with direct selling! They are doing administrative work, attending meetings, forecasting, etc. Therefore, they need to be able to identify those activities and figure our how to eliminate that wasted time and organize their other activities to where they are getting the maximum productivity possible.

A time management tracking sheet can be developed so a salesperson can clearly see how and where they were spending their time. This technique really made a difference as to how they organized their day and how they changed their approach to their territory.

This article is the fifth of a series of eight that highlights the reasons salespeople are not as productive as they could be and what can be done to correct the situation.

The fifth reason salespeople are not productive is that they are not presenting the business case to the buyer.

Most salespeople in the technology industry will tell you they consider themselves to be consultative salespeople. However, when asked, "How many of you have outstanding proposals?" Many hands will go up. Then when you ask, "How many of you have the cost benefit analysis and show the ROI to your prospect in your proposal as a result of buying your offer?" Almost everyone drops their hand.

A consultative salesperson by definition will show the benefits and return on investment to the prospect as a result of buying their solution. Therefore, they are not consultative salespeople.

What most salespeople are doing is quoting a price as to what their product or service will cost. They are not giving a compelling financial reason to make the commitment and move forward.

People are in business to make money and it on the salesperson to show their prospect how their product of service will make the prospect money. Otherwise, they are just showing them an expense item that will reduce bottom line profits.

The true consultative salesperson is calling at the top, getting the big picture and putting together a solution that shows the cost benefit analysis as a result of investing in that solution. This is a totally different approach than the salesperson who is just responding to price quotes needed for product or service.

With margins decreasing on hardware sales, survival of the VAR is going to require their salespeople to get out of the commodity box sale mentality and convert their mindset to selling to business issues and showing the financial business case for doing business with them. This is real value add it gets results.

One of my clients put this challenge to their sales team and had them go back to 26 companies who said they would not buy from them and show them the financial business case. As a result, they got six of those companies to change their mind and sold $4 million dollars of incremental business within 60 days.

The key to this transition is to teach your sales team the basic principles of financial selling and giving the skills to calculate ROI and Payback.

This article is the sixth of a series of eight that highlights the reasons salespeople are not as productive as they could be and what can be done to correct the situation.

The sixth reason salespeople are not productive is that they are not skilled in dealing with obstacles or objections.

Part of the reason for this problem is a lack of listening skills. Another reason is they are too focused on what they are going to say next, rather than listening to what is being said to them by the prospect and following that line of thought until it has played out.

Most of the time the prospect will tell the salesperson exactly what the obstacle is but the salesperson will just let it slide and never validate what they thought they just heard. Instead, they move on in the conversation and never really address the issue. As a result, the salesperson ends up spending a lot of time working on things that have nothing to do with getting the sale.

What the sales person needs to do is focus on the key word or words in a sentence. For example, It cost to much. The key word is cost. The salesperson then needs to focus his questioning on cost until he really knows that cost is the real issue and not just assume because the person said cost was the reason. Many times a prospect will tell you anything to get rid of you if they have little or no interest.

The salesperson need to validate that cost is the reason. They need to clarify and verify that cost is the issue before moving forward. They can do this by saying something like, "If I understand you, you are saying the cost of my product or service is what is standing in the way of us doing business. If cost was not an issue, would you buy it today?" If the answer is no, then you know the obstacle is something else. If the answer is yes, the salesperson then needs to cost justify the investment for the prospect.

The best way to enhance the skill of questioning and handling objections is to role play different scenarios in front of a group of people and critique the role play. This will give the salesperson the confidence they need to breeze through any obstacle.

This article is the seventh of a series of eight that highlights the reasons salespeople are not as productive as they could be and what can be done to correct the situation.

The seventh reason salespeople are not productive is that they are not putting in a full day of work. One of the reasons for lack of productivity is the salesperson simply is not putting in a full eight hour day or they are so unorganized, they can't get much done.

Some salespeople will take their children to school in the morning and show up for work around 8:30 to 9:00 in the morning. They will go to the restroom, get a cup of coffee, chat with someone in the hallway or office, check their mail, check their email and then it time for another cup of coffee. By the time all of these activities get completed, it may be between 10:00 or 11:00. They will then make a few calls, and these calls may be personal. Then it is time for lunch.

If the rep is remote, they may spend considerable time taking care of personal business during the day, picking up their children after school, playing tennis or golf. If they work out of the home, they may be constantly distracted by their small children during the day while they are trying to work.

Many salespeople will do all their administrative work during the day when they could be doing it at night. Work hour should be used for making valuable sales calls during that time.

Managers need to inspect what they expect or otherwise, they shouldn't expect much. We are all different and motivated by different things.

Personally, I like salespeople who have expensive taste, deep in debt and are highly motivated to maintain their lifestyle and continue to purchase expensive items and still be forthright and ethical in their business dealings. Salespeople need to be highly self motivated.

This article is the eighth of a series of eight that highlights the reasons salespeople are not as productive as they could be and what can be done to correct the situation.

The eighth reason salespeople are not productive is the company has put the person in the wrong territory.

We all have different personality styles and some of us are more assertive than others. Sometimes the type of territory we have does not suit our personality style.

If you have someone who is more analytical or amiable, they are more of a nurturing type person and usually do better with existing and larger accounts. If you have a driving or expressive type of personality, you will most likely do better in a new account territory.

If you are a start up company you will most likely want to start with a sales team that is aggressive in order to ramp up the business, which is one breed of salesperson. Once your business matures, you may need more of a nurturing type individual selling for you so they don't tick off everyone in the account due to their aggressiveness. On the other hand, you can't have a salesperson who is so laid back that they won't ask for the business.

The fix for this problem, is to use state of the art assessment tools. You can test for selling skills, but that does not tell you if you have the right person in the right territory. What you need to do is an assessment to determine job fit. You want to use a tool that will help ensure you will hire the right person and put that person in the right territory bested suited to their style, personality, and areas of interest.

There are a couple of products on the market that do this by using your people to establish the success pattern. The success pattern for a new account salesperson, a large account salesperson and an inside salesperson is different. Therefore, you could have a good salesperson, but have them in the wrong territory and not get the maximum productivity out of them. When this happens, they will often quit and go somewhere else which can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. It all could have been avoided.