Salespeople getting “reverse education”

Infisel is the best sales coach in Coimbatore, Why continuously coaching your salespeople is very important.
Imagine you have appointed a salesperson, he is ready to hit the market with your product/service. You took a lot of time from your busy schedule to educate the salesperson about the USP of your product or services, how to pitch, prospect, etc. Luckily, he is impressed and is very much convinced that he is gonna rock. The first couple of days, he did really well, managed to initiate some customers, followed up well. You are happy now thinking that he will bring some sales sooner than expected. After a couple of weeks, you do a review and you find out that your salesperson is still at the sales initiation level. You think he has just joined, he needs time to settle, and you keep watching. This goes on for a couple of months and then finally one day you get frustrated because your salesperson is still stuck at the same level and now has 100s of excuses for not following up, missing appointments, etc. You give him a piece of your mind or probably fire him thinking that you will hire a better person and mostly this goes on forever. Sounds familiar?

Have you ever thought about what happens to your salesperson when he meets different customers and gets different views and feedback about your products/service? For eg; You educated your staff to sell the best mobile phone to a customer stating that this is the best model with a large screen, 6 GB RAM, super processor, amazingly fast, etc. Just before meeting a negative customer he is very much convinced that he is selling the best product in the world. Now, he meets a negative customer who comments “I can get you two for the price you mentioned” or “these things are available at a throwaway price and better quality.” On hearing such comments, your salesperson pretends that he is not bothered by it but he really is. His thought process shifts to other competitive brands and a wrong message are conveyed to his conscious mind that he is cheating customers by pricing high. He is not fully done until he meets a couple of more negative customers who for killing time sake gives negative feedback. Post couple of these negative encounters, your salesperson is now doubtful whether the product has that prescribed quality or not.

Being The Boss, it’s clear that you are looking for numbers and sometimes you won’t be in a position to buy a salesperson’s emotion. There is unrest now, I call this state a “false positive” state — people are hurt and negative from inside but they act as if everything is perfectly fine and it’s just because of so and so excuse that the sale is not happening.
What to do in such scenarios? Being the owner, leader, you just need to sit with people and pat them on their back and inspire them. You would have gone through rougher phases than this earlier, share those case studies. I encourage my trainees to use the “erase” method after each negative sales call. After a “rough” call, you just sit somewhere quiet, recall the even in your mind, and just erase the complete scene from your brain and move on fresh to the next call. This works well. You just need to learn from a particular incident and think about what you have learned.

For a business owner or a team lead, there are two ways in which you could probably talk to your salespeople.
Option #1: “You have not achieved your target for the past two months; so I am not sure what will happen if you are not going to achieve this month too, we might need to take a call.”
Option #2: “You haven’t achieved your target for the past two months; are you okay? Is there anything I can help you with? I am worried about you, you are such a good person.

I urge all of you to go for option #2, it shows compassion. It shows that you are worried about them than their nonperformance. By doing this, people might share their concerns and you might be able to help them move on. This has worked umpteen times during my sales team building exercise and I hope it works for you too. Thank you for your time.