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.
Networking is certainly not new to business relationship building. The need for business relationships has been around as long as business transactions have taken place. The difference is now with social networking I can start relationships in minutes that typically took months or years before… if at all… anywhere in the world. Professionals and companies of all industries have adopted some sort of business networking integration with social media. They use these tools in a variety of ways to promote themselves, ideas and products.
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.
