How to increase your success as a salesperson
Sales can be a tricky business. Success and orders give a thrill, but it's also regularly disappointing. Customers who don't want, don't call back, whine and just don't cooperate. Recognizable?
The interesting thing is that often as salespeople (and people in general, for that matter) we tend to attribute successes to ourselves and failures to the customer. In both cases, however, both we as a salesperson and the other person as a customer played a role in the outcome. And you may have had a bigger role in the failure than you realize. In this article, we look at how you, as a director in conversation with your customer, can consciously steer the customer in the right direction.
A real-life example
Let's look at a real-world example. You delivered a first order for a customer. It was a pilot. Depending on the results, there could potentially be some nice follow-up orders and revenue from it. You are visiting the customer and want to evaluate and see what follow-up sales you can get out of it. After the informal start, you come to evaluating the first order.
You start with the open question "How did you guys experience the pilot?"
The customer responds with "The delivery was prompt, but we still found the quality a bit disappointing." Or even worse "It wasn't what we expected."
In your mind, you soon see your chances diminishing and pick up. The follow-up will usually be that you continue to ask about the problem. You then talk further on that together, making the problem even bigger in perception for both of you. You may end up lowering the price (perhaps that is the client's strategy) or there may be no follow-up business.
That's not what you want. So what could you have done better or differently from the statement above that you had a (big) role in?
Before we answer that question let's take a little trip into how our brains work.
Focus on what differs
We are all evolutionarily conditioned in seeing risk and the abnormality. We immediately see what is wrong hole, wrong or different. And we automatically react to that. For example, 2 sentences back there was the word "hole" instead of "goes." You saw that immediately. Possibly you reread it or thought all sorts of things about it. So that's how our brains work. We receive an enormous amount of external stimuli every moment. Almost all of it we process unconsciously. We see, hear, feel, smell and experience an enormous amount every second, and everything that is going well continues without conscious action or intervention. Only when we consciously bring our attention to it does it enter our conscious brain. Just bring your attention to your feet or if you are sitting to your buttocks. What do you feel there? Only now do you really experience that consciously.
So you can consciously draw your attention to something. However, when we perceive something as a threat, risk, deviation, annoying or the like, it is immediately passed from the unconscious to our conscious perception. This happens automatically. Think, for example, of an unexpected movement in your chair. You are immediately alert to the fact that you are not going to fall. This process happens continuously for 1 purpose. The primary purpose of us (and every living organism) is survival. In the past, to survive as a human being it was important to belong to a group. Without a group, your chance of survival was very small. Based on this history, we react strongly to situations that pose a risk to belonging to the group. That is why criticism is difficult (it is a form of rejection) and why many people find public speaking more difficult.
In conclusion, then, we can say that as humans we look at what is not good and we always want to remove those "threats" as quickly as possible. If you look at the example from this conclusion, you see 2 logical things happening. The customer easily names what is not right and the salesperson deepens that to try to remove or solve the problem.
Just as people can learn to speak in public, as a salesperson you can also be smarter about this type of issue now that you know this is the natural response.
Collect "pluses"
The negative points mentioned by your customer are called minuses for convenience. Basically, everything has positive aspects (pluses) and negative aspects (minuses) As Johan Cruijff said (or was it Willem van Hanegem?) "Every disadvantage has its advantage." This applies to your products, your brand, you as a person, your partner, your car, etc....
So you can assume that in a sales call you will be told minuses. Nothing bad and totally logical. However, it's important that you have pluses to counter that. And that ideally you make sure those pluses are enough to outweigh the minuses. To achieve that, you need to find the pluses that are important to your customer. You don't have to worry about the minuses. You'll get those in the conversation.
That means asking about the pluses. In the example above, the salesperson asked the open-ended question "How did you guys experience the pilot?" A much smarter question is "What appealed to you in the pilot?" or "What made you happy in the pilot?" This is going to get plusses anyway. You may get an answer like "The delivery time was good, but the quality was disappointing." The other person will quickly be tempted to start naming the minuses as well. Acknowledge the minus and park it for later by saying "Good that you pointed that out. We will certainly go into that later, but first let's look at what was good. What else appealed to you?".
That way you create a nice list of pluses. Above all, keep asking questions that are open-ended such as "what else was good?". This will keep your customer thinking further about pluses. A question such as "Was anything else good?" results in a yes or no and, if no, will stop the customer's unconscious willingness to think of even more pluses while the open-ended question invites continued thinking about even more pluses.
Also ask the pluses further out. Ask what was so good about the delivery time. This will make the plusses even bigger and more solid.
If you have sufficiently explored the pluses and the customer has not yet mentioned any minuses, you can ask the question of how to proceed with the project. If the customer, as in our example, said that the quality was disappointing, you should come back to that. Keep working towards a solution and don't explore the problem if that is not necessary. A question could be "You have nicely indicated what made you happy. Only the quality was disappointing. What is needed to be able to go into the follow-up process?" or "When would you place your follow-up order?"
Possibly the client is now consciously weighing the pluses and minuses in his mind and concludes that the pluses are more important than the minuses. Then it's easy and you can move on. If not, focusing on the solution helps to clarify when it does go through. And that's the goal of your conversation!
So from now on, look for the pluses and when your order or project can go ahead instead of focusing on what is wrong.
