There’s a key reason many people struggle to sell.
In fact, a great many full time sales people struggle to achieve the results they seek. The reason is obvious when you hear it. It’s just common sense. But so often in business common sense isn’t common practice…
I’ve been a lifelong advocate of making sure sales teams really figure out and apply the ‘sales process’ that is most apposite to their product or proposition, and, most crucially, to their prospects and customers. Most people actually like buying – especially if they’re getting to spend money that isn’t their own! So why not make selling about helping people to buy? We’ve seen this shift of paradigm transform results on numerous occasions.
However – we’ve equally often observed sales’ professionals study, practice and rigorously apply every element of such defined ‘best practice’ only to discover that, push comes to shove, they’re incapable of closing a window. That, despite everything, they are, in effect, ‘sales prevention officers’.
Almost as frustrating, we’ve also worked with some sales people who refuse to apply any part of the official sales process but who clean up! Consistently.
So how can that be?
As I say, it’s actually common sense. In the Power of TED (The Empowerment Dynamic), David Emerald writes about the FISBe.
The what??
The FISBe:
F = Focus. How you focus on something will create your
IS = Inner State. Which drives your
Be = Behaviours.
If I focus on something (e.g. sales) as a problem or a challenge, I’m likely to FEEL a level of anxiety. Which will most likely drive anxious behaviours (such as ‘pushing’). Which then block what I’m actually trying to achieve (‘pushing’ leads to ‘pushback’).
Clear as mud?
Let’s try a different example – from very personal experience! If I want to lose weight and I focus on that as difficult, or as a problem, then I feel anxious and fall off the new diet before day one is out. Result: I don’t lose weight. And feel even worse.
However, if I manage to reframe the subject and look at losing weight as a really positive thing to do, I start to feel excited, which leads to me doing the right things consistently, and I get my results.
So if I focus on having the ‘right relationship’ with the word SALES (and many businesses just don’t!), and I see it as a positive activity, then I get excited and display the behaviours I need to win my results – confidence; passion; enthusiasm; conviction; belief in the value I provide; genuine curiosity in the prospect etc.( I’m also unphased by hitting rejection or objection by the way).
So how do I do that?? Well – that’s a whole other conversation for another blog, but at least awareness itself is a critical part of the change needed.
So what if the focus – the ‘mindset’ - is right, and I have a base level of capability, but I’m still not getting the results? What then??
Well, maybe I’m not looking in the right place. There are 5 other potential reasons, any one of which may just be the blockage. The fact that sales/commercial directors are replaced 3 times as frequently as CEOs tells us more than we may immediately understand.
If you’re wondering what the other reasons for poor sales results might be, feel free (and it is free) to hop on one of our upcoming webinars to find out.
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