What Do You Blame When Salespeople Don’t Schedule Enough New Meetings?

  • May 23, 2016
  • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
  • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

Most salespeople suck on the phone. If you read that article, you learned about 10 common mistakes that salespeople make on the phone.  But those are strategic and tactical mistakes – they are skill-based.  What happens when you have salespeople who won’t even make calls? Could they be suffering from call reluctance? Objective Management Group (OMG) measures 21 Sales Core Competencies and one of them is the Hunter Competency. The Hunter has about a dozen attributes and 4 in particular determine if, and to what degree, a salesperson will have call reluctance:

  • 58% of all salespeople need to be liked to such a degree that it can have a negative effect on their ability to prospect for new business. They worry that a prospect might become upset and not like them, so they don’t ask the questions they should – when and if they call.
  • 20% of all salespeople have difficulty recovering from rejection to such a degree that it can prevent them from making calls. Not making the calls is a defense mechanism to protect them from rejection.
  • 13% of all salespeople possess a “will not prospect” belief to such a degree that they won’t prospect unless they are forced to by their sales manager.
  • 46% of salespeople are perfectionists who procrastinate until they believe they can do something perfectly. In the case of prospecting, it contributes to what seems like a time management problem (they didn’t have time to prospect.)  

The image below, from the evaluation of a large sales force, has salespeople distributed almost equally (unusual) among the four groups:

inside-sales-hunting.jpg

  • Hunters will hunt for new business without being asked.
  • Potential Hunters would hunt for new business if their sales managers held them accountable.
  • Fishermen will follow up on a lead, but won’t engage in proactive hunting.
  • People for the Ethical Treatment of Prospects will not hunt, no matter what, ever.

I’ll be leading a fast-paced 45-minute online presentation on The Magic Behind OMG’s Sales Candidate Assessment, June 7 at 11 AM ET.  There is no cost to attend and you’ll learn a lot about sales selection that you didn’t know before.  Click here to register.