We’ve all been there. The end of the sales period—month, quarter, or even year—is breathing down your neck. You have nowhere near enough deals on the board to meet your quota. Panic has arrived, and it’s time to get desperate. This is the point at which a salesperson becomes neurotic.
The problem with this state of mind is that the anxiety of that target not being met is wrapping up all of your attention, much like what being confronted with an angry bear might do—all of your attention is going to be in that circumstance.
As a salesperson, you’ve forgotten the past—all the lessons you learned, and all the sales techniques you absorbed and drilled. You’ve left behind all the possible marketing your company has conducted in the past, too. You’ve dumped all the planning you carefully engaged upon earlier in the sales period, which was how you were creating your future.
Now it’s a mad scramble to get any sale, any old way, right now, now, now.
The Salesperson Everyone Hates
Through the years, salespeople have been characterized in various unflattering ways. The “phony”—being overly friendly and flattering, even worse when it’s obvious that they don’t feel that way.
The “high-pressure” salesperson, who just won’t let up, stressing the prospect totally out until they cave in and buy.
The “I’ll do anything” salesperson, who keeps adding extras and lowering the price until the prospect can’t resist (although they often do, and this tactic regularly fails).
While there can be many reasons for such behavior, the most common one is that the salesperson has just simply gone neurotic. They’re pouring on the “sweetness” in a desperate effort to get the prospect to like them and buy from them right away.
The “high-pressure” salesperson conceives that they’ve run totally out of options, and is going to pound on the prospect until they give in. The “I’ll do anything” approach is done for the same reasons.
Competence
While the neurotic salesperson is trying frantically to be so, they are anything but competent. Normally, such a salesperson is the one who is frequently changing jobs, simply because they cannot make enough sales to remain at the same company for very long.
Closely examine a competent salesperson, and all of that anxiety you see in the neurotic salesperson just isn’t there. They are calm, cool, collected, and proceeding right along, making their numbers almost effortlessly. Others are often envious of such a person, wondering how they can remain so serene under the same sales pressure that they’re all under.
How do they do it?
2 Types of Sales Process
To answer that question, let’s look at the fact that there are two basic types of the sales process.
The winning sales process is the one we teach here at SELLability. It consists of 7 basic steps, which can be varied to fit the company and product or service sales process more precisely if needed:
Prospecting
Research
Contact and Interview
Qualifying
Education
Agreement
Closing
Anyone who succeeds at sales—that is, anyone who is competent—completes each and every one of these steps. You can examine any successful sale, and you’ll find that every one of these stages was completely executed.
The calm, cool and collected salesperson—the competent one—discussed above is someone who knows this process cold and uses it effectively with every sale.
The other sales process is the neurotic sales process. It consists of only one single step:
SELL NOW, NOW, NOW, ANYWAY, ANYHOW, ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN!
This sales process is the bottom-line killer—both for companies and individual salespeople.
You can probably figure out, just from your own experience and observation, which sales process works best!
