Almost everywhere I travel these days I hear owners, managers and salespeople talking about the rotten economy. One of my friends is a CFO who works with a company that sells products to heart surgeons. He told me that because of the weak economy and the number of people without jobs, his client’s business is down substantially because their patients are postponing elective surgery.
My dentist told me that his business is off because his clients are not spending money for cosmetic dental work. He told me, “the only way I get someone to fork out the money for my services is if they are in a lot of pain.”
This past week I had lunch with a young commission-based saleswoman who makes her living selling sales training. If she doesn’t make a sale, she doesn’t eat. For the past several years, she has been employed by a sales training firm that has an excellent reputation in that industry.
Although I would think that sales training would be one of the investments that many businesses would convince themselves they don’t need to make in a weak economy, this person impressed me with one of the most positive attitudes I’ve ever encountered, and she did so without coming across as cocky, arrogant or full of herself.
I noticed that she never slumped in her chair as we ate our sandwiches. Instead she was on the edge of her chair, alert and engaging 100% of the time we spent together.
Her demeanor was upbeat and pleasant. She asked good questions, listened well and gave me the impression that if I were one of her prospective clients I would have a difficult time saying no to whatever it was she was selling.
From the way she answered my questions, she convinced me that she knew like the back of her hand the challenges and obstacles salespeople must deal with and she had made it her business to learn how to teach salespeople the strategies and tactics to overcome each of them.
At one point in the conversation, I asked, “How has the current economy affected your business?”
Without missing a beat, without pondering over her response, she answered, “I really don’t allow myself to think too much about the economy. I believe it’s my performance in front of customers and prospects that has more to do with my success than the economy does. If I have done my homework correctly, everyone I meet with not only needs the services I sell, but can afford them, as well.”
My exposure to this saleswoman made me feel a bit ashamed about how much time I spend thinking about the economy and how much more time I should spend coming up with innovative ways to help my clients and prospects do a better job of improving their performance in the current economy.The economy is what it is.
I know intellectually that those of us who are successful in sales are successful either because of or in spite of the state of the economy. There is a lot of business in all industries that you and I are not selling; it’s going to one of our competitors. So to meet our sales goals we have to take more of it away from the competition than we did back when the economy was smoking.
If you are guilty of spending too much time lamenting over how strong the economy used to be, please join me by doing a better job of focusing on your attitude and your sales skills than you do focusing on the economy. How do you respond when customers and prospects tell you that your prices are too high?
How do you respond when prospective customers tell you: “Give me a little time to think about it.”
How do you respond when a buyer tells you: “I would do business with you except for the fact that a predecessor of yours offended me several years ago and I swore that I would never do business with your company ever again.”
It has been my experience that prospects buy from the salespeople who have demonstrated that they have the most value to offer them. And your value is determined by the SIZE of the problems you’re able to help your customers and prospects solve.
If one of your customers were to need for you to make an emergency delivery, the odds are that you would make it happen. Yes, you just performed a service for that customer, but not a very BIG service.
What will motivate your existing customers to buy more from you and you prospects to do business with you is for you to show them how to make more money, be more successful or solve their most pressing business problems.
If you will succeed in learning how to solve the BIG problems your customers and prospects are encountering I can just about guarantee that your sales will increase substantially. Now, let’s go sell something.