Goal or behavior oriented

What is the purpose with your sellers visit to the customer.

If you ask them at the weekly sales prep meeting they will something like this week i will close this and this and meet x new customers.

But in the reality that follows (the week) they usually don’t think on this at all.

Most sales reps just focus on activity since that is what the boss is most concerned with (in reality the boss is concerned with a lot of things but especially the lack of contracts).

If you are big on activity and have a lot of meetings with customers you will be perceived as a hard-working sales person. If you don’t sell as much as the stars is just factors beyond your control and easily shunned into a corner.

This should be a big warning sign for you as the employer since your sales will drop slowly over periods of time until they are very clearly substandard.

Riding shotgun with your staff is the job of the head of sales or you as the owner if it’s a smaller company and will be very educational in how,when and why your seller reacts in certain situations. But what is the key factor you should look at?

Is the seller going in to the meeting with a clear agenda to sell your product/service? If asked certainly if not asked they usually havent thought about this at all.

So what the difference?

A goal oriented seller will always try to steer the meeting towards points that they want. they do checks to make certain the customer gets what they are selling and manages the questions as opportunities to get more insight in what the customer really wants out of the product/service to buy it. Then the goal oriented seller will use this information to try to close the deal in this meeting or if it’s a more complex sell at a later meeting. but always doing everything at the meeting with the goal to close the deal.

A behavior oriented seller will be clueless on how to manage the meeting and will mostly present what they have to offer and leave it at that and if the costumer reacts and ask questions they will be responded to and then the meeting closes since there is nothing more to talk about. the seller will away and hope to get the contract next time.

They will only get about 10% of the deals compared to the goal oriented seller that’s the difference for you as employer.

So how will you get the seller to go from behavior oriented to be goal focused super achiever?

Upgrade them!

Talk to someone in the know and read up all you can there are very good books on the subject and also strongly consider hiring someone like me to help you out.

It takes training and a keen eye to spot how the changes take place and why and what more needs to be done with this seller. You can change them into a way better seller than they are now by focusing on this only.

Make them lead and take charge and make them close the deal.

Related articles

• Run Faster Goals Suck (leadershipforgood.org)