When you fail to make a sale, should you take it personally? Maybe!
Here are the only three reasons:
1. They didn’t like your offering
This is probably not your fault—perhaps your company hasn’t got its strategy right, but more likely the customer is looking for something different, something cheaper, or with different features. And that’s fine. All you can do is try to get better at filtering your prospects, qualifying them. Why were they even there? Is your website/marketing message clear enough? Could you get better at tailoring your offering so you can please more of the people more of the time? Do you want to go that route?
2. The offering was fine but they didn’t like the way you presented it
Now we get to something more serious—maybe you didn’t explain the benefits clearly enough, maybe you talked too much about features? Or maybe you talked about benefits that most people want but not this particular customer—did you identify their needs, their pain point, at the start? And then, did you go fast enough, but not too fast, with enough numbers but not too many numbers; did you adapt your presentation to their personality style? This stuff is learnable and takes practice—this is the one where sales people can get their hit rate up. It’s within your control. Get 100% brilliant at THIS!
3. The offering and presentation was fine, but they didn’t like YOU
Oh no! Is this really a reason for people not to buy? Yes! We’ve all done it, I bet you have—walked away from something we wanted because we didn’t like (or trust) the person selling. Maybe they were too pushy, didn’t seem honest, didn’t seem to really care about us, were too different from us to relate to (too young, too old, too posh, too casual, too boring, too odd, etc) didn’t really concentrate on us, etc.
Some of the above could be learnable (it becomes problem 2 rather than 3, how you present the offering, being as likeable and relatable as possible) but some of it is just how life is. Just as you don’t like all your customers, they won’t all like you, and you can’t win ‘em all. A harsh reality of sales. But I do think that sales people often blame failures on 1 or 3 when really it’s 2. How about you?
- This article originally appeared here.