Facts and Fallacies about Selling: Fallacy One

[topic]If sales fallacies are alive and well in your organization, they can harm you through lost sales and burned resources.

Fallacy one: Salespeople are obsolete.

Reality: For some products and services, customers need highly trained, skilled sales professionals. Marketing and sales tools can only offer a proposal; professional salespeople secure the business.

Today’s sophisticated prospects reject back-slapping, talking brochures, or slick, disingenuous, manipulative techniques.

There are not enough high-performing, professional salespeople to meet increasing demand. Most top performers have lucrative careers and are not easily lured away.

Modern companies need salespeople capable of persuading prospects to switch from their current supplier. Average producers and hard-working order-takers are poorly equipped to find and secure these new accounts.

Today’s sophisticated prospects reject back-slapping, talking brochures, or slick, disingenuous, manipulative techniques.

They do, however, invite professional salespeople into a mutually beneficial collaboration. Firms with salespeople at this level of competence command margins between 10 percent and 15 percent higher than industry averages.

What buyers want, what they get instead

What buyers want:

• Products and services that generate or save real dollars.
• High-value contact time with salespeople who create genuine value before signing agreements.
• Accurate, unbiased, and plausible business cases for their purchase decisions.

Consider the buyer’s perspective. Listen for aspirations and values as well as product needs.

What buyers get from most salespeople:

• Salespeople selling the wrong products and services for the wrong reasons or based on price alone.
• Salespeople asking irrelevant questions followed by a generic sales pitch.
• Little, if any, connection to the buyer’s specific needs or wants.
• Generic, boiler-plate proposals or spec sheets.

Some 80 percent of sales in most organizations are still booked by the less than 20 percent of salespeople who do not fall into the latter pattern above. This inefficiency costs both the seller and the buyer millions.

Quick-fix, technique-based seminars or complex strategic approaches miss the target. Some organizations have long given up trying to elevate their salespeople’s competencies. Others know their actions miss the target, but what choice do they have?

Plenty, and here are just a few:

• Study the buyer, not the product.
• Know the application of products and services, rather than the specs alone.
• Consider the buyer’s perspective.
• Listen for aspirations and values as well as product needs.
• Give no prescription without diagnosis.

Salespeople are needed today more than ever before. Unfortunately, many are poorly trained and cannot assist their prospects with their buying decisions.

When buyers do find a well-trained, effective salesperson, they are genuinely thankful for the help.

Dave Mather is a Performance Improvement Specialist at Dale Carnegie Business Group in Toronto.

Find Dave on LinkedIn.

The Epoch Times publishes in 35 countries and in 19 languages. Subscribe to our e-newsletter.

Read more at The Epoch Times