Understanding Behavior and How to Manage It

One of our three key areas to balance is what we call behavior. Behavior should not literally be how we behave, rather it's the critical habits, and activities needed to push sales forward. Logically, behaviors are things like, requests for referral’s, prospecting calls, appointments scheduled, face to face meetings held, closing sales, and any other specific activity that can be tracked and would lead up to an eventual sale and revenue.

How do you monitor your behavior? How do you determine what is the correct amount of behavior to be doing? Recently Sales Concepts invested in some new technology to help both our own organization and potentially our clients to maintain a healthy understanding of this behavior. Most salespeople need assistance when it comes to tracking and managing behavior. Accountability is often a missing link in developing the habits needed to achieve consistent success.

Do you have a realistic plan for your activity? Are you consistent with those habits? Do you know where to focus the training or management help to improve your performance? How effective are your sales tools to stay on task and how well have you structured a support system to make sure behavior happens? Ask yourself these questions or call Sales Concepts for help at 440-575-7000.

Be Wary of Our Own Assumptions

We find ourselves saying this very frequently, the job of a salesperson is to help prospects make a decision. Too often, as we are trying to get the prospect to make a decision we fall into the trap of making assumptions.

Assumptions are one of the root causes for many of the “sales nightmares” we can experience. Statements from prospects like “everything seems to be in line we just have to run it past our committee for a final ok, but you have my vote”. Or, “I am going to need a little time but I feel real confidant about what you have shown us”. We hear they are buying, but time may prove that was a hopeful assumption.

The result, we assume our contact is advocating for us, we assume that they are going to have enough horse power to push us through the committee or we assume they are telling us the truth. We may also assume that we have educated our contact to answer all of the questions that the committee might have? What if that one question we didn’t prepare our contact for is the question that the committee asks? This is called “Murphy’s Law”, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. What if we did not leave our results up to chance?

Great salespeople ask all the questions necessary to really understand the prospect’s intentions. Successful salespeople will not accept words that are not clear from their prospects. Avoid making assumptions rather get clear well understood commitments from your prospects. Before you go on your next sales call think about being wary of your own assumptions. Let us know your thoughts! Please leave us a comment.