No matter how great an organization is there are always customer issues. It could be a misunderstanding, personality conflict, a service level issue, or simply customer remorse. Many times all of these at once. As the original relationship builder, the sales professional needs to be able to work with customer issues or as I like to fondly call them, customer heat.
For the life of me I can not figure out how threatening a persons income has become a “stick” for sales training. “You could always not get paid”, “Your commission will be cut if you don’t…, You screwed up… which cost me.. and now is going to cost you!”. And yet I have witnessed this time and time again by so called “managers”. Why would someone do that? Why would someone let them do that?
I walk into our conference room and the visiting presenting manager, salesman and sales engineer were waiting there to give us their “dog and pony” sales presentation in hopes of my organization partnering with them. I know all of presenters from a previous business life. All very professional and successful in their own right. What happened next was incredibly short sighted on their part however. Below are my 5 takeaways from this experience.
Nothing was working! The first month as their sales manager I found myself watching our sales numbers take a dive right before my eyes in the current tough economy. My initial knee-jerk reaction was to give bigger discounts. That didn’t work. I changed direction with focusing on the “perfect solution” sale followed by strong closing tactics. It was important to capitalize on the few opportunities we were getting. That didn’t work either. If anything these changes were making things worse.