Facts are evidence based. They are proven and true. Facts are objective. Feelings are an emotional state. They are vague and may or may not be accurate. Feelings are subjective. “We can’t win this unless we discount” – is that a fact or a feeling? If you were the head of sales and your account manger come to you to seek approval for a discount in order to win a contract, how should you react?
Separate feelings from facts
Don’t jump into reacting with a YES/NO yet! Seek to clarify what are the facts that lead to the conclusion that “we can’t win this unless we discount.”. Help the account manager look for evidence to support / debunk their assumption using the following questions: What gives you that impression? How can we verify that this is true? What authority does that contact has? In what ways does offering the discount guarantee a win? Once you have enough facts to support / debunk an assumption, you can determine the next step action together with the account manager. Chances are, similar cases happen more often than we know of. Imagine a team of 20 account managers, each give away 5% margin too much because they have the tendency of assessing sales opportunities with feelings rather than hard facts. What is the potential damage to the annual sales? What is the impact of that 5% multiply by x number of account managers x 12 months has on your overall profitability?
Empower the salesforce to separate feelings from facts
We can’t really blame our account managers if we didn’t provide them the proper training to begin with. As the management, we need to reflect on ourselves: Have we trained the account managers to differentiate feelings and facts? Did we prepare them to ask customers questions that would enable them to stay objective? How proactive are we in offering coaching support?
Use process to help shape behaviours
We cannot have an objective perspective until we have gathered enough facts around the issue and the customer. In the world of selling, a good understanding of the following areas would certainly help improve the win rate: 1) The customer’s business issues – what are their challenges and how they are impacting the business. What are the payoffs for resolving them. How can we help. 2) The decision guideline – who can influence the decision. What are the decision criteria and ranking. 3) The competition – how are we stacked against the competition in the eyes of the customer. In the real world, customers don’t always volunteer such valuable information. And if they do, chances are they’ll give it to the competition too, giving us no competitive advantage. To get an upper hand, we need to build a habit of making conscious effort to dig out information. Sales leaders can revise the sales process to make sure account managers ask questions around the above 3 areas. The CRM tool can set to mandate collection of specific information. Opportunity stages should be defined by objective evidence rather than subjective feelings. So the next time one of your account managers come to you with a “We can’t win this unless we discount”, what will be your response? Author: Eva Lam Tree Consulting Asia Company Limited [email protected] [email protected]