More Sales Are Lost To A NO DECISION than Competition
Getting to a Decision Is the Essential Objective Whether
Selling Virtually or Face-to-face.
After 50 years of experience as both a sales executive and a buyer, I have come to the realization that most salespersons really do not understand how to fully actually execute face-to-face selling or virtual selling. As a result, most B2B sales efforts fail or what I call dissipate, when a sales rep’s underlying selling processes do not accomplish pre-defined, step-by-step, progressive objectives in alignment with the buyer’s decision-making and purchasing model. Not accomplishing this underlying alignment results in more sales efforts being lost to a ‘no decision’ than to competition.
The basic reason underlying this lack of sales rep understanding is not recognizing that just as there remains a sales process for ‘selling’ that still exists no matter how you attack selling. A prospect’s ‘buying’ process, one that is firmly embraced by the prospect remains. Every prospect holds an experienced-based psychological structure or model for making a decision and buying.
There is a lot of clamor around the use of virtual selling. Sales leaders are forgetting that the prime mission of the sales rep no matter the method should be to convert their sales effort into an agreed buying process. A buying process that works for the specific prospect. This means engaging in causing an ‘ownership transfer’.
Sales processes must be structured to meet not only the sought-after prospect's needs and benefits but need to be conducted according to the buying model/structure held by the buyer. You must discover how your prospect makes decisions and most importantly how a prospect makes a buying decision. Without this discovery, the sales effort will quietly fade away into a ‘no decision’.
I understand and recognize the attention on SEO, emails, webinars, advertising, etc. that are being used to fill sales rep funnels but in the end, if sales reps cannot execute the underlying essentials in face-to-face selling or virtual selling?
Too many high-level marketing processes and the leadership that builds them, overlook the fundamental need to concentrate upon and build and educate sales reps in a sales process that actually works in practice.
Many sales leaders believe that all a sales rep needs to do is to present (demo) their product or service properly and the buyer will automatically understand it, want it, and buy it. Unfortunately, we know this is simply not true. Prospects are not only buying a solution, but they are also buying its cost-benefits. It is the cost-benefits that they ultimately seek. Do your sales reps know how to uncover and extract the essentials of the buyer’s buying model that frames a GO decision?
Converting selling to buying means creating an ‘ownership transfer’ from the seller to the buyer throughout the sales process. The buyer must feel that they are making the best, proper and defensible decision in accordance with their buying model and that buying your solution becomes their idea. In the final analysis of buyers and hidden change, agents must be motivated by proof to believe that they need to adopt your particular solution and want to do so quickly in order to secure the agreed-to benefits just as soon as possible.
Most sales efforts fail when sales reps do not accomplish or overlook the buyer’s pre-defined buying objectives, decision methods, and sought-after benefits. When they fail at doing this is when a ‘no decision’ happens.
To achieve the goal of getting to a decision which is the real mission each sales step must be based on a logical, previously accomplished sales process step and they should proceed only when a buyer has granted them permission to move to the next step.
Do you have a defined sales process with clear steps that help capture buyer-defined permissions, needs, and objectives? If not, it is time to engineer a process that does so. No matter the selling method.
xSelleration's proprietary sales process allows you to de-code your most effective sales process so that you can create and deploy an enterprise-wide sales support system that increases revenues, empowers your entire organization, speeds up onboarding
and enables you to exceed your sales forecast.
Mike Radice is the Executive Director of Sales Process Engineering at www.Xselleration.com.