I had an revealing discussion with one of our client’s this morning.  This gentleman is the President of his company and we are running our process for a second sales position (selected 1 salesperson already).  The conversation centered on the problems he had with a previous salesperson who has since been let go.

This salesperson was completely reactive – he possessed no selling system whatsoever.  His process was to take a call and fish for a request for proposal (RFP).  He would respond to the RFP and hopefully get the business.  Sad, but that was his process.

The President was hesitant to let this sales guy go because he thought their RFP work would decrease.  They fired the guy and the RFP rate has continued unabated.

I asked the President what is the pattern for winning the RFP process.  His response – “We get the business when we are the lowest price.”  He followed that up by stating that it is obvious these companies do not see the value that the company brings to the marketplace.  This statement is absolutely correct.  The previous salesperson could not sell their unique value.

Our client has a unique finishing process that has tremendous advantages over the competing processes in the market.  Unfortunately, it is a rather unknown process and it costs more “per piece” to use it.  The long-term cost of the process blows away the competition.  But here is the rub – if a salesperson gets caught up in the RFP price matrix, they are toast.

When someone from a large company is making a purchasing decision and they do not understand your value, they will always revert to a price decision.  Their reasoning is simple, it is highly unlikely that they will be fired for choosing a lower-priced option that fails.  They can simply state they chose the best solution according to their price matrix.

Pathetic.  And a real issue for salespeople if they are asked to sell a product or service that is not the low-priced option in the market.  The difficulty is that value is not solely determined by price.  Price is simply a component of the value.  When companies cannot determine the unique offering you bring to the market, they simply drop your solution into an Excel spreadsheet.

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ManageSmarter.com offers a well-timed article titled Top Ten Ways to Kill a Deal. I say this is timely in that we have been dealing with multiple employment offers over the past week. These discussions are similar to salespeople closing a deal and, in fact, we like to observe the salesperson’s technique in handling these topics.

The first point in the article is the most critical to success in negotiating:

1. Don’t show emotions
Emotion€”such as neediness, desperation, or excitement€”are immediate turn-offs. Keep your body language and style of speaking emotionally neutral. Prepare your state of mind ahead of time. Repeat the mantra, “I don’t need this, I don’t need this,” until you believe it.

Nothing is more important to successfully closing a deal than maintaining emotional detachment to the deal. An emotional salesperson tends to lose objectivity which leads to them abandoning their selling approach. It has been my observation that salespeople who reach this point lock in on quickly closing the deal at the expense of seeing the long-term implications of the deal.

The best negotiators I have seen have the ability to walk away from the deal as this author suggests. The threat of not doing business with you is the buyer’s strongest tool. A salesperson who becomes emotional cannot negate this silent possibility.

Another related suggestion:

7. Don’t try to be friends.
The person sitting across the negotiating table from you is a respected opponent. Thinking about a long-term relationship or dwelling on whether or not he likes you is certain to cloud your decisions and disrupt your emotional neutrality. This keeps you from being in the present moment and from focusing, observing and collecting information.

One of the myths of selling that persists is the belief that the prospect must be your friend to purchase from a salesperson. Yes, there must be some rapport-building (dependent upon the sales cycle), but friendship is not a prerequisite to closing.

The reason this myth is so damaging is that salespeople cannot separate their emotions from their role. Sales is a position racked with rejection. A baseball player with a .300 career batting average can go to the Hall of Fame, but they still created an out 7 out of 10 times. Sales is similar to this analogy in that even successful salespeople face more rejection than success. If the salesperson ties their own self-worth to the suspect’s reaction to their approach, they will burn out quickly.

As an aside, this principle is the primary reason why so few people are successful at selling.

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