Why emphasizing “building relationships” can hurt inside sales
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Feb 07, 2011 @ 10:02 AM
During my inside sales training courses, I emphasize the value of finding out about the prospect’s business: who does the prospect sells its solutions to (internal or external), and how might our solution potentially positively impact the prospect’s bottom line? And I provide this truism: the prospect won’t buy anything unless it helps his or her company to make money, or stops it from losing money.
A challenge we do have in the sales training business is working with under-performing reps that place an over-importance on the concept of “building relationships.” It takes these reps longer to make a sale, because they feel they’ve got to “earn” it by making several relationship building calls before they ask for the order. One problem that occurs in this situation is that after awhile, they feel the prospect is a friend, and have great difficulty in asking their friend for money. So they don’t get around to asking the closing question.
Sometimes, this reticence to ask for the order early in the sales cycle comes from a Customer Service orientation, where the sales rep feels the job is really about public relations, and not about sales. You can’t make an inside salesperson out of someone who doesn’t enjoy asking for the order. A common challenge I’ve seen is where customer service reps, who loved being helpful, non-aggressive, and giving things away, were converted to inside sales, where they had to ask for the order, negotiate pricing, and couldn’t engage in long calls with no sales objective while chit-chatting about non sales-related issues.
This whole topic of relationship building came up this week because a client of mine has a rep with very poor sales numbers. Her conversations have consistently long talk times, yet she has consistently fewer orders than other individuals on her team. She defends her situation by saying she’s building relationships for bigger eventual sales. Her manager listened to some of her calls. A lot of talk about golf, travel, and sports. Not enough about the prospect’s business.
If you’re an inside sales manager reading this blog post, you may want to look at the under-achieving members of your sales team to see if they’re spending too much prospect phone time chit-chatting about non-business related issues, and not enough about the prospect’s business issues. And if you’re a rep, make an effort to keep focused on how your solution can help your prospect’s business run more profitably, rather than on her upcoming vacation to Baja.