Understanding the Sales Force

There are dozens of reasons why performance among salespeople falls short of requirements or expectations. Your salespeople should over achieve, not under achieve.

When most salespeople talk about calls gone bad they’re often talking about sales horror stories, a trend developed by Dan Seidman at Monster Sales News. I believe that any sales call that fails to move forward (next step, base or stage) is a bad call. When a prospect ‘didn’t hear anything that interested him’, one of two things happened:

Most companies experience losing important customers or clients at some point in time and statistics can certainly support a claim that you can’t keep every customer happy. But it’s that justification that usually hides the real problem, a problem that can duplicate itself again and again.

The interesting thing about this list is that most of the topics have little, if anything to do with closing. As a matter of fact, if a salesperson is effectively executing the process of selling, all of these topics are dealt with long before a salesperson determines that an opportunity is even closeable.