Our focus this month, for the newsletter and blogs, is on our just-released book Closing is NOT Your Problem! With this book, for the first time in history, the problem of 20 percent of salespeople making 80 percent of the sales—commonly known as the “80/20 rule”—is fully solved.
The Sales Process
As covered at length in the book, the one missing element from many sales approaches is a real and effective sales process. The sales process laid out in Closing is NOT Your Problem could be called a fundamental sales process. While companies might expand it to adapt to their specific product and service sales, it will be found to be basic to every effective sales process in existence.
How Do Top Performers Sell Without It?
You might have seen top sales performers, those in the top 20 percent, who perform great despite the lack of a sales process in their company. That doesn’t mean that a sales process is not essential. It simply means that certain top performers can often compensate for no sales process. They can solve any problem or fix any situation—they’re so good at what they do that if something goes wrong, they can fix it right away.
During our research for the book, when we asked the top 20 percent of salespeople what caused them to be in that bracket, the number one answer was “I don’t know.” Basically, they were just great at what they did, and they didn’t know beyond that. For that reason, we had to carefully observe salespeople and conduct our own research on what made these people special, and our book was the result.
We did notice there was a sequence to everything these top 20 percent did. But it almost didn’t matter because even if they did something wrong, they could fix it. If they skipped a step or missed something, they could rectify it.
The Middle 60 Percent
In our last article, we talked about the 80/20 issue, in which 80 percent of salespeople make 20 percent of sales. Our research found that it could be further reduced to 20-60-20. That middle 60 percent are the ones who are inconsistent—on again, off again. Targeting this middle 60 percent for improvement can drastically raise your sales.
The middle 60 percent can’t work without a sales process, which is why they’re inconsistent. They almost always lose the sale if they skip a sales process step or do it incorrectly.
When a sales team doesn’t have a reliable sales process, a salesperson, to make the sale, is constantly having to go back and try and fix things they messed up. If they don’t have that skill, it will be very hit-and-miss.
Additionally, operating that way is hugely time-consuming—it’s double- and triple-work. It has a severe effect on the sales conversion rate. And, as noted in the title of this article, it is a profit killer for a company.
Symptoms of Missing Sales Process
An example of a missing sales process would be a salesperson thinking that a prospect is waiting for a proposal, and therefore sending a proposal. But then the prospect doesn’t respond to the proposal. Or a prospect agrees to an appointment for a presentation but doesn’t respond after that. Or they keep rescheduling.
The Diagnosis
What’s genuinely behind these issues is that these salespeople are skipping sales process steps. Perhaps the salesperson is trying to reach the close faster, but in any case, they’re not ensuring that each sales process step is solidly done.
If we liken the sale to a constructed house, the sales process would be its foundation. With a sales process wholly done, the foundation is solid, and you have a steady building. But when the sales process is not entirely done, the foundation crumbles and that building isn’t safe at all.
A well drilled and effective sales process that covers all necessary steps involved in selling opens the gate to significantly moving the middle 60 percent into star salespeople.
Buy and read Closing is NOT Your Problem! by Nick and Lisa Terrenzi now!
