Christer B Jansson in this article offers 5 concrete business realities in sales as a reflection of one of the previously written articles 8 Myths About Sales.
Business reality 1. New prospects are the lifeblood of any selling company.
Getting new customers is like getting fresh blood in your body. All businesses lose customers. Some more than others depending on how they behave towards their customers. Customers buy less sometimes because of their business and sometimes many customers buy less at the same time when there is a recession. The only way to ensure a company’s growth and long-term survival is to continuously supply the company with new customers. That is probably one of the reasons why prospecting is said (in books used in universities about sales) to be one of the most important jobs a salesperson does, and in some companies the most important job.
Business reality 2. Sales is about contacts. The more you contact, the more you sell.
This reality is often questioned and if we look at evidence-based research in all countries and industries, it is the case that those who sell the most have more customers to sell to because they prospected the most. There are some exceptions but they are few. Of course, it is understood that you run on the target group that benefits from your goods and services and you can sell. Everyone who remains as a salesperson in an industry sells at least enough to stay. In other words, they have the required skills so they only need to make more business visits. Whether it happens online, by phone or face-to-face, or a combination of these, depends on what the customer’s buying process looks like. In order to be able to make more customer visits, there are different ways to create the time required. By thinking about whether we are targeting the right target group so that we don’t spend a lot of time on deals we still don’t get.
Business reality 3. Without prospects, presentation and closing skills are useless. So are competitive products, generous commissions and costly sales support.
To sell, you need to contact the customer. At least as long as we’re talking personal selling. If you don’t make contact with customers, you have no one to sell to and all the skills you and your company have are useless. Only when you make contact with the customer do both your skills and the company’s skills become extremely important. When we talk about sales efficiency, we need to understand what efficiency consists of. Efficiency is productivity multiplied by quality. So do you work with both or just invest in quality? In addition, productivity is related to quality. If you make too few customer visits, you lose quality, and of course this also applies if you make far too many. In most companies I’ve worked in or work with, it’s not too many people who are the problem if I say so.
Business reality 4. Getting salespeople to prospect—not showing them how to do it—is sales management’s biggest challenge.
It’s so much easier to show salespeople and train them how to do it instead of making them do it. It is very much about the sales management’s knowledge of leading people who are often strongly performance-oriented and their knowledge of how people work. A job that places great demands on leadership, competence, knowledge of sales so that a selling culture is built in the company, not just in the sales organization. Sales enablement is a relatively new concept that is becoming increasingly important and an important role in ensuring that decisions made in other departments do not disadvantage sales, but decisions made should affect the sales department positively or at least be neutral. As usual, there are exceptions to this, but that is a chapter of its own.
Business Reality 5. 40% of all experienced salespeople admit that they had one or more instances of sales obstacles serious enough to stop their continued career in sales.
85% of all sellers we tested in the world have a rash of sales obstacles. However, not everyone has it to the point where they lose business for that reason. However, many do not reach their potential due to the level of sales barriers they have. During their careers, experienced salespeople report that just over 40% have had several occasions when the sales obstacles were so great that it hindered them in their career as a salesperson. If we generally look at the Swedish results of the sales barrier test, Swedish sales organizations should be able to sell between 40-60% more than they do today.
