Selling without passion and excitement isn’t selling – it’s pontificating. Learn the difference in this article.
As part of my consulting business, I often do ride-alongs with salespeople who work for my clients. Lately I’ve seen a trend that is bothering me – an awful lot of what I call “flat” sales calls. By “flat,” I mean calls devoid of emotion, excitement, and interest. To be sure, information is exchanged. Questions are asked, statements are made, customers are educated about the product. But no excitement has been built, no momentum or what I call “Sales velocity” has been put in place, and it’s unlikely that the opportunities will result in wins.
What’s lacking? Passion. Passion, primarily, on the part of the salespeople. Passion is my word for that indefinable something that creates and builds interest and excitement on the part of the customer. Don’t get me wrong; the salespeople are asking questions. They’re making benefit statements. They’re explaining. But there’s no fun or excitement in it, and that’s a problem. When the call is over, the customer is no more (or less) interested than they were before. Ultimately, I think there are two causes for this.
First of all, for whatever reason, the salespeople aren’t “into” the calls. They’re going through the motions. Going through the motions, regardless of what you’re doing, is obvious and boring. Here’s an example – I’m not an actor. Give me the script to “The Dirty Dozen,” and I could learn Lee Marvin’s lines. But could I portray Major Reisman like Lee Marvin? Not at all; it would be obvious to everyone watching that I was just reciting lines. Lee Marvin was passionate about that role and knew how to convey it. Me, not so much.
Where does sales passion come from? Well, for too many people, it doesn’t. Where it exists, it comes from an excitement, involvement in, and commitment to the selling profession. It comes from a true beliefin what you are selling – have you sold yourself before you try to sell anyone else? It comes from a need to make buyers feel the same excitement you do. It comes from recognizing the buyer’s needs, seeing what is going to happen through the adoption of the product, and feeling the same result as the buyer.
For too many salespeople, that kind of sales passion is left at the door. The result is wildly unsuccessful – and boring – selling. There’s another reason, though, that sales passion can be missed, and that’s the fact that too many salespeople don’t understand what the customer is really buying, and what I focus on in my speaking and training engagements.
Customers buy successful outcomes. Whatever need the customer is trying to address through a purchase, what the customer is really buying is the experience of fulfilling that need. If a customer is buying a tent, he is buying the experience of being sheltered from the weather at night. If a customer buys a new car, he buys the experience of driving it.
If you don’t know, understand, or address that successful outcome, you’re not going to be able to create that excitement in your sales calls, and you will find yourself offering a lot of proposals that sit on the customer’s desk with no sales velocity (we’ll discuss “Sales Velocity” next week). Want to avoid this problem? Here are 5 steps to incorporating sales passion into your calls:
- Sell YOURSELF on your products or services. If you were in the position of a target customer, would you buy? Why? If you can’t do this, all else is meaningless.
- Take a few moments before each sales call to remind yourself of #1, and get excited about the new opportunity in front of you.
- Understand the buyer’s needs by asking good questions.
- Moreover, get your buyer to define the most successful outcome that he/she is seeking from working with you.
- Finally, paint the picture for that buyer of the successful outcome; don’t just describe it, help them experience it. Let them live in that moment for a few minutes – THEN move the sales process forward.
If you do this consistently, you will get away from the “flat” sales call, and you’ll sell more and enjoy it more. How’s that for a good deal?
