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You are here: Home / Collaboration And Convergence / Stop Straight Line Selling

Stop Straight Line Selling

October 16, 2013 by Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

In the quest to meet your sales quotas, you see each quarter as a race to the finish line, don’t you? Chances are your perception of selling is heavily influenced by your company’s sales culture. There are incentives offered to motivate you to meet and exceed prior quotas. Gamification strategies are supposed to make the selling process fun.

It’s hard to have fun selling when the roadmap you are following isn’t easy.

Your sales organization makes you feel that you only are as good as your last sale, your last quarter of productivity.

Your sales organization makes you feel like you are a greyhound, racing around the track to get that elusive rabbit.

Except you know you are not a hungry animal. You are a person of worth. Your selling career represents a portfolio of valuable skills and outcomes that you offer employers and customers, as well.

Have you ever considered yourself from this perspective?

Even if you are a selling newbie, take a 10,000 foot eagle’s eye perspective of your selling activity thus far. Over time, what trends emerge? What habits and perspective do you bring to the business table, time after time? It’s not just about getting a customer to sign a contract. It’s more about the journey you took, with that customer, to achieve the pact you make when the contract is signed.

What does the roadmap of your sales journey look like from that 10,000 foot perspective? From that perspective, you can see the business topography, and it’s not flat. There’s no straight line pathway to follow that gets you from Here’s a Customer to There’s a Signed Contract. From this perspective, both in hindsight as well as with foresight, you identify roadblocks impeding your “idealized” straight-line trajectory to the finish line.

Most of the time, you are working off-grid, dependent on strategies and tools in your sales toolkit. Some are useful, some will be abandoned along the way. Your ingenuity is involved in creating and implementing the best strategy to win the sale.

Each opportunity builds your experience in reading the roadmap correctly, and understanding when to go off-road, instead of charging straight ahead. Do you provide the customer with what they are asking for or do you recommend what they really need, in your experience? Do you dutifully follow the rules of selling that you’ve been taught over the years, or do you opt for short-cuts? Are you patient and disciplined in cultivating the customer, or do you rush the sale?

Do you still feel like that greyhound racing around in a straight-line chasing after a target that’s always beyond your grasp?  Consider developing a higher level understanding and perspective of your own strategy, process and habits.

Perhaps it’s time to shift your own perspective of your Self Worth and Selling Worth. Leave chasing race track rabbits to someone else.

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo and business- and revenue-producing collaboration and communication tools to startups and small and mid-sized businesses.  Her book, Do YOU Mean Business, is now available in eReader format!

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Filed Under: Collaboration And Convergence, Human Capital & Industrial IoT Workforce Tagged With: sales organization, sales quotas, selling activity, selling career

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