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How to win the hide & seek game with your buyers

Why do so many B2B salespeople fail?A report I read recently stated that 37% of B2B salespeople turnover each year.Staggering.But why is it so difficult to find, hire and develop a successful salesperson?After extensive experience and research on this topic, we’ve discovered 4 main reasons why salespeople don’t perform as expected, and we offer some advice about how to increase your success.

Have you ever presented a proposal to a buyer and never gotten a response…one way or the other? Just like every other B2B salesperson, it’s likely you have. The old saying, “love me, hate me, just don’t be indifferent to me” is the way I think about these situations. Just tell me something! So, what are the best tactics to apply when you are in situation like this? This article provides 5 ways to follow up on sales proposals you’ve presented.

You can read hundreds of articles about what elite salespeople do but few about what they don’t do. So, here’s a list of 5 things elite salespeople don’t do.

Before your buyer makes a decision to buy anything from you, that buyer has to “buy you” first.Nothing good will happen if you aren’t able to make a strong connection with your buyer.Underscoring this challenge, here are some stats that might surprise you…

Failing to get some level of commitment from a buyer before providing a proposal is one of the biggest mistakes professional salespeople make. Many salespeople will ask a buyer, “Would you like me to put a proposal together for you?” Think about it, what buyer would respond “no” to that question. After all, the salesperson ends up doing all the work and providing free consulting to the buyer. Buyers expect and to some degree deserve free consulting, but the imbalance of time in this scenario is inappropriate.

Sales training without customized skill practice and ongoing follow up is like getting your knee replaced and ignoring post-surgery physical therapy. It is never quite the same. We’ve all experienced it before – well not the knee surgery part. You attend a one or two-day sales training seminar and at the end you feel like you can conquer the world. You feel like a selling beast. In the training and development industry, we call this feeling the “post training high”.

Lessons from the Front Line: The top 5 useful metrics to Create Structure and Discipline in Sales

The internet has changed the lives of professional salespeople in a big way. Recent reports suggest more than 70% of the buying journey is done anonymously online. Combine that with more competition and information that is so easily accessible for the buyer, buyers are far more empowered and educated than they were only a few years ago.

Nearly every time you read about the top traits of successful salespeople you’ll find a section about qualifying buyers.In sales, the buyer is not the only one who should be making a decision.The salesperson has to decide how much time and energy to pursue the buyer.Too much time invested in an unqualified buyer prevents the salesperson from working with the right buyers to achieve his goals.