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How (not) To Make An Impression
Posted by Colin Wilson
In May 08
I have a confession to make… because my job is all about helping others improve their sales performance I can’t help myself analyse other sales people when I come across them… and the confession is… that I can go from disappointed to downright angry when I come across poor performance.
A few years ago my wife had decided… notice she decided… that we were going to have solar heating installed. We invited a few suppliers around to discuss what we wanted. All of them made the big mistake of doing a product pitch… they had a deck of slides and they were going to go through them no matter what!
I had done my homework, I knew what I wanted. I did not want a product pitch. In the end I had to say to one poor guy whoc kept ignoring my pleas to stop turning the slides… “if you turn over one more slide you are out of here”… he got the message, but was then completely lost as what to do next!
I recently came across a good article on the web by Ian Brodie of Sales Excellence that covers this subject very well… Selling Without Slides… he mentions what he calls the ‘pencil selling’ approach… it’s well worth a read. It’s what my solar powered friend should have done.
Equally, I also came across another article that ties in to this subject of basic selling skills. Chris Whyatt put up a post on his blog entitled… The Gap between What a Potential Customer Wants and What They Can Afford… again, well worth a read. It made me think of the solar powered friends… although they weren’t solar powered you understand, they were just selling solar power… because each of them were trying to sell us a Rolls Royce solution because that’s what my wife said we wanted… but it was not what we could afford!
3 Comments
AS a sales guy sometimes the last thing I want to experience is a bad sales presentation. People in sales positions that have ONE way of doing business and not being able to adapt to other people will consistently lose deals. Asking what the customer wants in order to be convinced is the best key.
Why are salespeople so prone to pitching product? It’s unfortunate.
Whoever once said “people don’t care what you know until they know that you care” was right on the money. Salespeople must resist the temptation to pitch product until they’ve developed an understanding of the prospect’s situation. I think prospects absolutely hate the product pitch unless it’s tailored to the specific needs and situation of the prospect.
After just reading Brad’s woes with the boat salesman on salesmanagement 2.0 I think this comes very close to what epitomises sales frustration from business professionals.
I for one hate that powerpoint mentality that forces a prospect down one linear train of thought. It insults a person’s intelligence and greatly reduces the common ground between solution and problem. It also insults a sales person if a company trains someone to become essentialy an automaton. As you allude to, when they are forced off their script, they flounder. What kind of skills are these people being taught?