Sales confidence is one of the biggest challenges that sales professionals and sales leaders face between their sales calls, sales presentations, and especially sales prospecting. And it’s not just true for new sales professionals; it’s even more so for tenured sales professionals with 10 and 20+ years of sales experience.
Why?
These three factors sabotage sales confidence:
1. Buyers, customers and prospects don’t see the value of a salesperson’s role, knowledge and ability to demonstrate value.
That’s why they’re so quick to blow you off. They don’t reliably return emails or voice mail messages, so it takes many more touch points and different and stronger messaging to get their attention. When they do return your call, they ask you for your best price, then involve more people in the decision-making process, stretching out a more challenging buyer cycle to greater lengths than ever before. This happens with existing and even favourite clients who are not as responsive to you as in the past. That cuts into the love (and even the like!) you feel as a salesperson, and that can erode your confidence, making it tougher to reach out to new clients.
2. Sales professionals are more reactive and have little time for proactive planning and strategies.
When we are in reactive mode, we are putting out fires, usually fixing problems or following up on customer orders. Sales confidence is eroded when we are in fire-fighting mode because it seems to take all the running we can do to stay in the same place. It’s too tempting to procrastinate on prospecting when there are “just not enough hours in the day”. Sales professionals are not allocating the necessary time to be proactive to find new customers. Sales preparation builds sales confidence. Sales professionals need to follow a proven sales prospecting process that enables them to be more proactive, rather than simply reactive.
Sales confidence is one of the biggest challenges that sales professionals and sales leaders face. Share on X3. Competition is fierce.
Customers are more demanding and more knowledgeable than in the past, because they do their research before they talk with a sales professional. Many sales professionals and sales leaders have not stepped up their A-Sales Game to be able to quickly and confidently articulate their company’s value proposition against their current competitor, how their products/services will provide better solutions to their prospects and customers, or how to handle all types of objections from securing a meeting to securing a sale.
The best way to increase your confidence and overcome these three factors that sabotage sales confidence is to practice prospecting. Buyers and this economy need Strategic, Pro-active and BRAVE sales professionals who can turn product and price conversations into purposeful business conversations!
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.