For the most part, salespeople know what to do to increase their sales.
They know to prospect more, listen more than they talk, ask for the sale, gain commitment along the way, sell on value and not price, and so on. They KNOW these things.
They just don’t DO these things. They even WANT to do all the things I mention above. They promise themselves and their managers they’ll get better at doing those things.
Then, nothing changes and we’re left with our “lack of sales” problem. Why haven’t we been able to fix that or at least make significant progress with it?
Because we haven’t faced and addressed the number one problem that causes a lack of sales.
Simply put, sales are a result of sales performance and sales performance is a direct result of sales behavior.
Our sales challenge is really a human problem. We’ve been so focused on the “Sales” side of things we’ve ignored the “Human” side of the challenge.
We have a sales performance challenge because we have a human performance problem.
That means we have a human behavior problem. That’s what we have to address.
Performance is a matter of human behavior, from start to finish.
To improve performance we have to change and improve our behavior.
And we don’t know nearly as much about how to change behavior as we’d like to think.
We can’t fix our lack of sales problem until we gain more understanding and ability to help salespeople change their (human) behavior.
Here’s a sobering fact:
Few of us know much about improving performance by changing and improving human behavior. How could we? What education do we have to claim that skill?
Yet, there are three groups of people with great skill in improving behavior and performance:
Elite therapists. Elite coaches. Elite sales leaders/managers.
The first two groups have professional education and experience and the results to prove it.
The last group intuitively knows how to help someone change their performance by changing their behavior. And their results prove that.
A sales leader or sales manager that doesn’t fall into one of the three groups above isn’t going to dramatically increase their team’s sales for one simple reason: They don’t know how to change the behavior of their individual salespeople.
If you want to improve your understanding and skill at changing sales performance by changing human behavior (the only way to do it) you can read books on the topic, go to workshops on the topic or get an effective coach to build your skills.
The first two will help but they won’t likely make a significant impact. But it’s a start.
Coaching on how to change human behavior, and therefore, sales behavior, for you or your salespeople is the fastest, most effective way to raise sales because it’s the fastest way to change human behavior, sales behavior, and sales results.
What do you think? Weigh in on the subject by leaving a comment or question and let’s start a discussion.
Call me if you want to talk about this with me. You’ll go away with at least one pivotal insight that will help you increase your sales. (678-778-9012)
Categorized in: Articles, Career Success, Leadership, Persuasion/Influence, Self-Improvement
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