Which do you need help with?
Eventually, the answer is “Yes” to both. However, you need to know which area of your selling process you should work on first.
Selling better is a matter of your selling skills
Selling more is a matter of getting in front of more prospects or customers.
Both are important, but if your selling skills are poor, trying to sell more will simply frustrate you and will lead to burnout.
Let’s assume your sales are “Medium” to “Doing Ok”. You sit down with your sales manager and begin discussing your territory and how to improve. You’ve been on territory now for five or ten years and have a pretty good feel for selling. You’ve had success, but the Ag economy is under pressure, customers are tightening their belts a bit and sales have dropped.
Your sales manager asks a few questions like,
“Where does the majority of your business come from?
Who’s the 20% that gives you 80% of your business?”
“Let’s take a look at your prospect list. Who do you think you will sell in the next 60, 90 or 120 days?”
“What do you need from me to sell another 5 customers this month, quarter, year?”
You see an opportunity to answer one of the questions in this barrage. So, you blurt out, “I just need more time!”
With that, your sales manager stops and the questions go a different direction. Now, she focuses in on how, where and what you are spending your time on.
Rarely in this exchange between manager and salesperson does the topic come up that the salesperson really needs to sell better. We are prone to say that we know how to sell, we just need more time to sell. It’s then left up to the sales manager to decipher whether the salesperson is actually good at selling but needs more time versus the salesperson needing to be better at selling.
Going through the sales manager’s mind are questions like:
“I wonder how many sales calls a day this he makes.”
“Does he spend too much time chatting and not enough time productively selling when in front of a customer?”
“Does she ask good questions? Does she ask closing questions?”
“Is he always going to his favorite accounts, because they are closest to his house or offer him less resistance? “
“How hard is she prospecting? Who is she prospecting?”
“Does he give up too quickly when meeting objections?”
“Does she continue to try and beat a sale out of this dead horse prospect?”
“When this salesperson fails to sell a prospect, his reason every time is that the prospect is a “waste of time” or “just a price buyer”. I wonder if that’s true.”
The answers to these questions don’t have black and white type answers. There’s no perfect understanding of when you are spending too much time with your pet accounts or when to give up on a prospect. However, if your answers to your sales manager about your productivity are always about more time, lower prices and better products, then it’s time to review your selling skills. As hard as it is to admit, you might need an extra set of eyes on your selling skills to help you improve.
Here’s another way to look at it. No matter how much time you get or how much your company improves your products, if your selling skills need improvement, you are still going to have poor results. As Stephen Covey points out in his “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, sometimes you need to stop cutting and sharpen the saw.
Here are a few more sales productivity questions to ask yourself before you sit down with your sales manager:
- Am I seeing enough customers?
- Am I seeing enough of the right customers?
- When I “see” them, am I selling or just making a social visit? Here’s my opinion on this subject as it pops up from time to time. I realize that not every sales call on a customer over the course of five, ten or fifteen years will be a question-riveting sales process. I did the social visit myself from time to time. However, that also means you should be able to get business done without the question-riveting process. So, if you truly are such good friends, that’s great. Now, get the sale while drinking a barley pop (that’s a beer in WI) together.
- When presenting to customers, what’s my closing ratio? I’m not a big fan of these type of ratios because outside of the salesperson’s opinion they don’t mean much. However, since you are the salesperson, how often are you successfully closing after you make a presentation? Your ratio should be higher for customers than for prospects as you have history and trust with customers. If you have a low ratio, where in the selling process do you go wrong?
- Am I seeing viable prospects?
- Do I have a system for sorting and tracking prospects? Sorting means by priority or interest level. Tracking means you stay in touch and follow up as they asked you to or as you think you need to.
Working with salespeople over the years, I’ve seen this frustration played out many times. They continue to search for better products, lower prices, better credit terms, more time in the day, less administrative demands of them, but rarely do they raise their hand and admit they need help to improve their selling skills.
Be aware of your selling skills and be humble enough to admit you need help to sell better before you can sell more!
Want to learn more about the critical skills of being an Ag Sales Professional?
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- Four of the most critical skill areas to grow your territory and dominating your market
- If you enjoy and learn from my blog posts, you will love these webinars. They dig deeper into the four areas.
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