Why Most Companies are Struggling to Grow Revenue

Chris Scirpoli, of Invoke Selling, managed to engage me for nearly 15 minutes in a power-packed, fast-paced, video interview that covered a tremendous amount of ground in a very short period of time.  He did the mandatory, “Tell me about your background.”, but he left nearly 13 minutes for me to elaborate on the greatest challenges to sales managers and salespeople, and the various approaches that can be implemented to solve these challenges.  Because of the questions which he asked, it was one of the better interviews with regard to content.  You can watch the interview here.

Dan Perry, writing at Sales Benchmark Index’s Sales Force Effectiveness Blog, wrote that “The single biggest problem with sales today is sales reps are mismatched to the buyer.  They think like a sales rep and not like a buyer.”

Well, Dan, I don’t agree and I have the statistics to back me up.  If you were to interview buyers (we don’t call them that in 2012, we call them procurement specialists today), I’m sure they would agree with me because they don’t want to be sold anything by anybody!  They want total control, want to squeeze every last dime from you, and don’t want to share any information that might help a salesperson gain an edge.

The biggest problem with salespeople today (I can back it up with the data from Objective Management Group, which has assessed more than 550,000 salespeople) is that 63% are not reaching decision-makers and 58% begin the sales process with procurement.  In general, the sales population doesn’t possess the skills to sell consultatively (on average, salespeople have only 21% of the attributes of the consultative skill set), to uncover compelling reasons to buy and to use those compelling reasons as leverage, and to differentiate themselves. That leverage causes decision-makers to tell their procurement people to do business with your company (the company that stood out).  If your salespeople can differentiate themselves to such a degree that a decision-maker wants to buy from you, it’s the internal decision-makers that must sell the procurement folks, not your salespeople!  When the opportunity finally arrives at procurement, only the terms need to be negotiated.

Don’t believe everything you read.  Just because it’s printed, doesn’t mean it’s good.