I had a sales rep that is a long time friend of mine call me today and ask me an interesting question. Before I tell you the question let me tell you that I first hired this rep in 1987 to work for me and he was with me until I sold the business in 1994. He had worked his way up from a rep to my GM over the 7 years he was with me. I am telling you this so you know that I am the one who trained him from his start in sales and we have kept in touch ever since.
The question he asked me was, how much and how hard should you push a prospect to buy? I was floored. After 25 years in sales he was asking me this question. I wanted to know why he was asking and he said that it seems that things have changed so much over the past 3 years that he wasn’t sure his normal instinct as to how much to push was still valid and he felt he may be losing sales because of it.
This made me stop and wonder if the answer I was about to give was valid. Is what was normal in years past still normal today? I told him I wanted to think about it for a few minutes and asked him if I could get back to him. We agreed I would call him back in about 3 hours when we would both have time to talk.
To tell you the truth, I was relieved to have some breathing room. I really hadn’t thought about it like this before now and wanted to get some additional feedback before I gave him any advice.
I called a few reps I know and asked them the question. And just as I thought, my usual answer that I would have given would have been off track a little.
What I was told by the reps I called is that in today’s market you need to push some prospects harder than ever before and others you can barely push at all. It seems that what was normal has almost disappeared.
I thought about their answers and it made good sense. In today’s economy more and more businesses are either thriving or on the brink of failing. The number of businesses that are in the middle is dwindling to a smaller and smaller number every day.
This means that the thriving businesses can be pushed harder and the failing businesses can’t be pushed at all. So in a nut shell, the answer for my friend was yes and no!
I called my friend back as promised and gave him the good news! He didn’t seem to be as excited about my findings as I was. Then I followed it up with but you need to take each customer on their own merit and no one answer fits every customer.
Here is where the laughing started. My friend got very quiet, and then in what may be the most serious voice I have ever heard him use he said, so that’s the word from the great training superstar? I laughed and said I would rather tell you what I know and be right than what you want to hear and be wrong.
I guess more than anything else I learned that the market is at best fragile and we need to alter our selling to meet the needs of the customer. In other words, nothing has really changed.
Lorin
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