When I quickly run through the Sandler sales methodology I often hear sales directors or business owners telling me they already follow something very similar and already incorporate it into their sales process.
And yet when I ask what sort of conversion they are getting from quotation or presentation to closed business it’s almost always low. 20% or 30% would be on the high side. And yet, if we follow the Sandler process correctly and fully, it should be more like 80% or 90%. I don’t mean you should be closing 90% of leads, but I do mean if you have got to the stage of investing in your prospective client to the point of creating a proposal, then it should be more or less a done deal. Why would you want to offer your expertise for free unless you are pretty sure you are talking to your next client?
So where, typically, do salespeople go wrong? They mean to follow a good qualification process and yet they aren’t getting the results you’d expect. I asked an audience at a business expo recently to consider what might be going wrong in each stage of the sales process. The reasons they came up with were illuminating. Illuminating because they knew what could be going wrong, and in detail. And yet those very mistakes are probably happening in their business right now. The reason for that discrepancy between expected result and actual result is that during the sales process it’s very hard to see what’s going on as you get so caught up in the process of trying to solve a problem or close the next deal. Unless you have a cast-iron process and you have practiced and practiced the kind of questions you want to ask, you’re going to fall in to the trap, once again, of providing a proposal to someone who can’t or won’t use it.
I offered two things to that audience and I extend that same offer to you now. If you send me your email address to pglynn@sandler.com I’ll send you a free e-book that explains the Sandler sales process so you can at least see what you could be doing better. If you add “yes” to that request, it means you’d like a 10 minute conversation to see if I can help make that process work far more often in your real world.
Paul Glynn
Sandler trainer
