My first job as a sales manager was with an in-home sales firm. It was summer, and my boss wanted me to find out why the five-person sales staff consistently produced poor results from June to September. So, I bluntly put it to my sales reps and awaited their responses.
“You can’t find people, they are always out and about,” one explained.
Another shrugged and said, “People are not interested, they are too busy planning vacations.”
A third chalked it up to the weather: “It’s too hot.”
Being young and inexperienced, I accepted the answers as reasonable and figured things would turn around once the weather cooled down and the decision-makers returned to their offices. But a strange thing happened a few days later.
Part of my duties included making personal sales calls, and after a few weeks, I noticed my personal sales weren’t as bad as everyone else’s. In fact, they were a little above average. And, while I found that some people were a little more difficult to reach in warm weather, I discovered that if I increased my prospecting efforts a bit, I had plenty of leads.
Suddenly, I started to realize that the excuses the sales people were handing out were just that — excuses for doing a poor prospecting job. Worse, the sales people had been telling themselves this negative stuff for so long that they actually believed it.
To prove my theory, I started monitoring their selling efforts. Within a few weeks, it was obvious that they had fallen into poor prospecting habits. I confronted my staff and challenged them to focus on practicing good prospecting and qualifying techniques. The results were exactly as I thought; sales took a big leap.
That experience left me believing the old sales manager’s axiom: “It’s not what you expect from people, it’s what you inspect.” I’ve been following it since.
Over the years, I’ve heard all kinds of creative reasons from sales people for weak performances. It’s left me wondering why people blame outside sources for their inability to sell. My only conclusion is that it’s a lot easier to blame summertime, poor economic conditions, the job market, or the man at the car wash for shoddy results than it is to accept responsibility for not being effective.
Who really wants to tell their sales manager that sales are down because they take two hours for lunch, then quit the day at four o’clock instead of five to get a jump on traffic? Who would admit they spent the morning driving the spouse around on shopping errands? That they spent hours involved in useless conversations with customers who purchase very little instead of prospecting for bigger accounts?
The problem with excuses is that it doesn’t take long to believe them. And once you do, it’s hard to get out of your slump.
But once you recognize the problem, you can solve this so-called excuse affliction by going back to the basics of sales. When you’re in a sales slump, it’s a good idea to start your road to recovery by retraining yourself. Go over your sales manuals and review what a new sales person would be taught about getting business.
Ask yourself if you are really doing these activities now, or if you have slowly slipped into negative selling habits. Review your time management skills. Do you make the best use of your hours or are you winging it day after day?
Finally, count the number of new people you speak with when you’re out prospecting. Do you talk with enough people to deserve new business, or do you just speak with a few, then become discouraged and give up? Depending upon what you sell, it’s not uncommon to speak with 30, 40, or even 50 people before you locate one or two good new prospects.
The bottom line to poor sales is that it’s often not based on the reasons you think. Usually, the answer is as close as the nearest mirror.
Ted Tate, a sales training and marketing consultant based in Mentor, is author of “Just Sell It.” Reach him at www.trainingexpert.com