As a continuation of my post from earlier this morning, I came across another Selling Power article that complements the point about the importance of asking the right questions. The Sales Intelligence Imperative provides detailed statistics regarding the point at which many sales stall. Interestingly enough, the researchers found that prospects were dropping out at a surprising time:
New research from CSO Insights shows an €œalarming erosion€ in sales reps€™ ability to move the sale forward from that initial conversation. Specifically, 57.6 percent of companies in 2005 said more than half of their initial conversations progressed further into the sell cycle.
There will always be salespeople who approach the wrong prospects due to a lack of prequalifying. Some salespeople prefer any call instead of no call.
CSO managing partners Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer say the reason companies are struggling to move prospects past initial conversations is that today€™s ultra-informed prospects want reps to demonstrate a value-add beyond product knowledge during the initial meeting. When a rep can€™t do this, prospects shun further meetings.
That is exactly correct. We have completed sales opportunity post-mortems for our clients and found this lack of value-add to be the top reason an opportunity is terminated before moving through the selling system.
Prospects can research your product or service through the web at a level that has not existed in days past. Heck, I remember thumbing through old Thomas Registers to find information about manufacturing companies. In those days, a salesperson spent much of their time explaining their product or service offering and that was a perceived value.
Today, those types of salespeople see “alarming erosion” in their forecasts.
(and my apologies for the title of this post – I simply have a weakness for that old saying)