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Calling at Your Comfort Level

A risk sales people often make is calling at their comfort level. This means they make sales calls to people they like, people they think like them or people they are not intimidated by. These buyers are often the Relationship Buyers or Coaches in your strategic sale. Because of their personalities, these people are often in middle management and not in decision making capacities. In order to be successful, sales people have to step out of their comfort zone and reach decision makers. The decision makers may not always have personalities the sales person finds easy to relate to.

Chicago is a huge sports town. I see sales people start a call talking about sports all the time. Theyll talk about whatever is in the media today, what team is hot, or what scandal is taking place. We’ll leave the call and the sales person will have the impression thatthey had a really successful call. The truth is they may or may not have built a connection with the prospect. More often than not they have not built a connection at all. If the sales person was not skilled and kept the conversation at sports they will not have learned anything about the buying process, the goals and objectives, the individual buyers personal agenda. All they learned was how that person felt about changing the name of Wrigley field. This information isn’t so helpul when youre trying to sell your product or service.Some ways for sales people to over come this type of call reluctance and to call outside their comfort zone are to read and be aware of whats going on in the world, not just whats interesting to them.

Learn how to hold a conversation on topics theyre interested in. Stretch. Understand how to create a conversation that is interesting to the listerner. Have an agenda before each meeting of what it is youd like to learn. Make sure you leave the meeting with an outline of next steps.Be careful not to get stuck calling at your comfort level.Broaden your comfort level and you’ll be able to call on any buyer at any time.

May 9, 2012 - Posted by Alicia Dale | Business Building | sales tactics, sales training, selling skills development