Professional Visitor or Professional Sales Person?

“To work smarter not harder" is a well used catch phrase but how often is this achieved?  As the manager of sales and business development teams how often are you left with the feeling that your people are seeing clients, but beyond the “hello” and general chat nothing of substance is happening?

In this day and age the bottom line is always in the spotlight - budgets, share prices and the board drive our sales efforts. So it is increasingly important that the contact time with customers is productive. Not only are we busy - customers are too and the last thing they want is an interruption to their day that does not yield results.

The question then becomes why is there this phenomenon of “Professional visitation”? Often the cause can be isolated to a sales person’s reticence to ask the “hard questions”. Preferring to operate at a more superficial level there is little chance the sales person will ever become involved in negotiating their way through customer demands, price issues etc.

The Professional Visitor’s Profile:

   •  Continual rounds of visits to clients they are comfortable to do business with
   •  Lengthy amounts of time spent establishing “rapport”
   •  Difficulty zeroing in on real customer problems rather than symptoms
   •  Inability to effectively negotiate the way around the “price” question
   •  Sticking to the “safe” but irrelevant topics
   •  Walking away with no advancement in the sales process
   •  Selling the same old products/services, not adding new ones
   •  Customers continually asking for more discount
   •  The customer controlling the sales process not your representative

Have you ever felt  “If only half the effort was put into representing the company’s interests as well as the customers!” there wouldn’t be this constant battle to provide more discount, more often?

The professional visitor hesitates to get into the fray with customers as they are not comfortable being assertive.  The cost to you becomes more volume at the expense of profit, a failure to see opportunities with customers, longer than necessary decision cycles. Are these costs you can continue to carry?

What Makes a Top Performing Sales Person and Do You Have Any?

The top performer - like the world-class athlete, tennis player, musician - there are only a few of them. In sales what is that elusive thing that sets your top performing sales people apart from the rest of the bunch? 

It is often said that top performers are those who close the most deals, have the best knowledge, the most sales experience.  However based on extensive research conducted across industries world wide one of the key things separating top performers from others is their ability to make more contact with potential buyers of your products or services more often than their hesitant peers.

About Sue Barrett and BARRETT