5 Reasons Your Sales Team Struggles with New Business Sales

Seeking comfort is a powerful primordial urge. We report to the same building every day. We park in the same parking spot. We head to the same desk, talk to the same people, and order the same thing from Starbucks. Daily. Over and over. We love our comfort zone. Scientists call this the place of “optimal (low) anxiety.” It’s no wonder your salespeople want to stay comfortable at work. Why prospect and face rejection when I can call on current accounts? Why engage in the difficult conversations needed to close business when I can find so many other seemingly productive things to do with my time? If you suspect you’re being victimized by your people’s comfort zones, you may ask yourself if they’re even motivated to do more.

Do you know what motivates all of your people? And I mean actually have scientific data and evidence for the conclusion, not your best guess. Do you know if they’re even motivated? An alarming number of salespeople simply lack the level of motivation necessary to succeed in this profession. Additionally, the money-motivated seller is increasingly less common, especially within the millennial generation, so a generous pay plan won’t necessarily light their fire (if it ever did in the first place).

 

Selling, like entrepreneurship, is a tough business. The rejection is fast, frequent, and relentless. And most take it personally, even if they pretend they don’t. You can work your tail off for months and come up empty. You must have difficult conversations each and every day. You must be OK with being misled or outright lied to. It’s not for everybody. There’s a chance they’re not the right people. Managing accounts and selling new business requires different skills. Or they have the raw abilities to excel but are underdeveloped. 80% of self-talk is negative, so they’re probably not helping themselves any. If they get stuck in a tail-spin, it’s difficult to recover.

When you make a hire, you get a person that is the aggregate of beliefs, experience, capabilities, etc. With the good comes the bad. By the time they were in grade school, the majority of their belief system was cemented in place. Some beliefs benefited them then and continue to benefit them now. Beliefs such as “look both ways before you cross the street” and “chew with your mouth closed” served them well as children and continue to serve them to this day. However, many of these beliefs impair their ability to function as a sales professional. Their mothers told them over and over again to “never talk to strangers” and not to “bother people while they’re busy” and “it’s impolite to talk about money” and “don’t ask too many questions.” Then you come along and give them a job. On their first day you show them their office and their phone. And their marching orders sound something like “pick up that phone, call some strangers while they’re busy working, ask them a lot of questions, and talk freely about money.” And now we wonder why they freeze up. The truth is that in the battle of beliefs between mother and boss, mother wins every time.

When your people get some type of derivation of the word “no” (let me think about it, your price is too high, etc.), can they correlate what they heard to where they failed in their selling system? Do they have a clear understanding of the top 5 objections they are likely to encounter every step of their system and how to prevent these objections from manifesting in their prospect’s mind? Do they have a thorough understanding of your marketplace advantage as stated as business differentiators? Do they have a plan of behavior that will get them to your goals as well as their own? If they do, are they held regularly accountable to those behaviors? If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, your people just aren’t adequately prepared to do their job, let alone do it effectively.