When salespeople miss hitting their sales quota, it is never because they lack business opportunities. Instead, it is because
they do not know how to identify and close potential sales opportunities.
More Sales Than You Can Imagine
Despite the pandemic, there is still more than enough business to go around and closed. First, however, you need to know how to
identify the opportunity and close the sale on value instead of having the lowest price.
Dropping
Price
When salespeople drop their price, they telegraph to the prospect they need the business instead of wanting it. Therefore,
lowering your price voluntarily, as in retail, is equivalent to running a sale.
False
Beliefs
There are many reasons why salespeople and sometimes sales managers believe they can not hit quotas. Some will say, "Our prices
are too high; we can't compete." Others will say, "We don't have the right brochures, or our website is not up to date,” to justify why they are not closing sales.
In some cases, the salesperson believes everyone is a prospect. And will make a presentation to everyone.Unfortunately, this
belief leads to too many unqualified presentations, proposals, and quotes. As a result, the sales pipeline is filled with stuff and requires more follow-up time.
This Was
Missing
Another reason salespeople miss their sales quotas is their lack of objective, measurable criteria for each of the pipeline
stages. This lack of the correct standards leads to a subjective form of measuring a cold-to-warm-to-hot prospect.
Now you have a situation where there are too many improperly qualified leads. To make things worse salespeople will follow up
on these unqualified leads, resulting in more wasted time .
Going Off The
Tracks
Salespeople will invest considerable time prospecting, getting to decision-makers, booking appointments for a demo, and then
blowing the opportunity to close the sale.
Why?
Because they believe the demo is going to close the sale, and it does not. I have attended dozens of demos,presentations,lunch
and learns, briefings designed to close the sale but instead focused on educating the prospect.
The purpose of a demo is to continue to qualify the potential sales opportunity and, when appropriate, provide specific
solutions. Then, and only when the prospect has agreed that they will purchase if the solutions presented can fix the issues.
306 Hot
Prospects
I coached a salesperson who believed he had 306 hot prospects and still did not hit his sales quota for several
years. His followup call was, " Hey how is it going? Any changes yet?
Finally, after we established the proper sales pipeline criteria for his prospect list, we whittled the list down to 27 hot
prospects. After we improved his sales process,guess what happen. He hit his quota for the first time in years.
Start From
Here
For you as a salesperson or business owner to change the outcome, it is necessary to change your perspective. When you have a
different view, it spawns other activities and new and different results.
A Personal
Example
When I was new to sales, the company that hired me told me not to prospect against XYZ company because our competitor did what
we did.
After I conducted my research, I developed a strategy to take business away from this competitor. Within six months, I closed
ten new accounts under contract for three years from the company believed to be just like us. The sales amounted to $36,000.00 a month.
