SALES AND SALES EXCELLENCE

The Biggest Reason Your Sales are Falling

Trust me you’ll want to know this

Do you run a Sales Team, a business or maybe you’re a Director and CEO and cannot figure why your Sales Conversions are falling?

Maybe you’ve recruited well, have a good team, maybe even decent Sales Manager.

Maybe, also, you have spent fortunes on Sales Training and implementing one of the many expensive Sales Implementation Structures on the market, only to then see things swan-dive.

Your Sales Team follow the procedures, they follow-up with clients, they present and pitch with client feedback being positive and promising (as it often is when reported from sales teams direct) but the numbers don’t reflect expectations with revenue gaps now starting to appear.

Thinking you have done everything yet cannot figure why things are not working, there is one last thing many organisational leaders fail to identify.

Trust.

Why sales fail due to lack of trust

Trust is basis for any relationship. Consider things internally for a second. Have you had friends or associates that have let you down?

I don’t mean, show up late for a meeting and be a little frustrating. I mean, a real cross level breakage against your values and beliefs that hits the pit of your stomach and hurts for days.

Sure, if this is a misunderstanding and can be explained, all is forgiven, but if it’s not, or becomes a repeated matter, you’ll probably have found you moved away from the offending person, detaching that person or group of people from your life altogether.

The same can be said with Sales, the biggest difference being, for new clients at least, there is no history or association to rely on.

You have to create and make relationships under formal proceedings or meetings, opposed to meeting new friends in bars or restaurant on social occasions. The reason why sales don’t progress in these cases is due to a lack of trust, with not enough time and attention spent trying to create it.

The challenge of trust in sales

Sales people do act differently at work than at home and this is due to performance pressures. Those performance pressures tune a person’s attention to making a sale, a deal, creating profit, etc.

This is rewarded by sales bonuses, commissions, pats on the back and your name in lights on Sales Leaderboards. Sometimes just keeping your job and boss off your back is enough, but this is all part of the problem.

The other issue is the self-will drive of sales people wanting to be successful and respected. This is all part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, so very much a Human Trait.

If these people worked in HR, Communications, Operations, wherever, they would demonstrate similar traits but in different ways. Yet in sales you cannot afford to turn into an aggressive, money driven machine and expect clients to respond positively. It’s all counter-intuitive.

How can trust be formed in sales?

This is the golden question, with many to most sales people getting this wrong, even when they are told.

The quick answer is this, the reverse of the above.

When organisations shelve matters regarding pressures and profit, instead tuning to serving the customer, experience confirms more sales come. They often come at higher prices as well, thereby creating greater profits.

I say organisations in the first instance, as the trickle-down effect of culture and management from the top affects what happens below. But when focus arrives on performance decks, you then need to have the right team.

Loud, egotistical, selfish flashy personalities don’t work well on Sales Decks these days. Customers and clients are too savvy to be treated in brash ways, seeking reassurance for their purchase that only comes from calming voices and personas.

So nice, steady, unselfish personnel are usually those that cut it and make it in today’s new world of sales commerce.

You don’t necessarily need Angels, as they’ll be giving the product away, but you do need people that know right from wrong, can operate between rules, respect and are perfectly happy being honest with a client, even if that means losing a sale.

Do you have these personalities on board, or do you have more of the former? Even if you have the right mix, what processes are used to build trust?

Processes to build trust

This is where debates occur. I have personally not yet seen a sales process that builds trust. I have seen however, sales processes practiced allowing the opportunity for trust to be formed, the processes themselves not being solely responsible for trust being achieved.

Trust, after all, is dependent on two people conversing, one learning to trust the other, whilst the first proves they can be. Relationships are formed over many weeks or months, especially in Business-to-Business sales.

But what processes really work, and how is trust built?

First and foremost if you have the right people this becomes easy. Sales staff always wanting to do right by customers, to aid and to serve and being allowed to do so by their organisations will always achieve more than others.

There still needs to be guidance though. Being trained of knowing what questions to ask, when to ask them and how to follow-up, but if a sales person has the correct values you are more than halfway there.

The second is to review the processes.

Have you trained your sales personnel to conduct a warm-up? Do you, or they, even know how this should be done?

Often called the discovery stage, this allows you to get to know the client (Know Your Customer, KYC) and find out how you can help and add value.

When done correctly you will find this is also counter-intuitive, done by not starting proceedings by talking about sales or the product at all. You talk and ask about the client.

I’ve lost count with how many Social Media posts there are about solving the Customer’s Pain and sure, pain can be part of the equation.

However, your worst enemy can put ointment and Band-Aid on a wound if you’re bleeding, but that’s no use if they stab you in the back soon after. So solving pain is not the only way to win business.

Adding value and building trust, is.

A well designed warm-up not only creates the opportunity of building trust, but it acts as a Road Map for the rest of discussions.

A road map from your warm up

Knowing what to plan, how to discuss it, when to link and lead with product engineers, etc, is crucial for making the sales process relevant for your client. But how can all this be done without making a plan?

It can’t.

Having a Road Map helps to plan your route and acts as guidance. It also means you can revert back to former discussions with your client, helping to confirm that you’ve listened to them, building further trust.

Reverting to former discussions to check details introduces one more useful measure, the Law of Consistency. Nobody likes to be seen as not doing or aligning to what they have formerly said, so going back over former discussions helps to keep clients synced and on board as well.

Thereby having a map, a Road Map for your sales process and knowing how to read and orientate it, is critical.

How else could successful selling actually be done?

Trust works both ways

We all know this to be the case, but the other mistake many organisations make is they dwell so much time on winning deals they take their eye off the ball for checking whether the ‘client’ can be trusted.

I used to say the most expensive account is the one you don’t win. However, witnessing mistakes made over the years, the most expensive account is a non-trustable client. Period.

Demanding more than they deserve, inducing scope creep into service projects or simply not paying on time all have consequential issues for a business.

Several companies I know have actually failed due to these matters, especially the latter, when delayed or non-payment creates issues across supplier chains, creating problems for other clients.

Having a closely detailed sales process can therefore save expensive client issues at a later stage, as long as again, you have the right sales team on board that can raise and accept these as risks not to pursue, opposed to chasing another deal simply for commission.

Does all of the above solve everything?

Does all of the above solve everything? Of course not. The above are key principles and target models to aim for. The secret magic however is not just doing what is suggested, but knowing specifically how these measures can be implemented.

Again, knowing the questions to ask during discovery stages, using your voice for tonality, watching for eye or body movements on your client during discussions, all make notable differences for knowing what else can be done to build trust.

A route, map or plan again being critical, but this can only be created with your client if they are prepared to show and tell you where they want to go.

Resting on your personal experiences again, would you tell such insightful information to somebody you didn’t trust? In this day and age, no. This being another reason as to why trust should be formed and being able to find the right people and design the right processes for it to be, is crucial.

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