As a sales leader, one of the most unmotivating phrases we can hear from the CEO is “stop selling.”
This phrase is usually uttered by linear thinking CEOs who don’t understand a) without sales, there is no company and b) sales, especially in technical environments, isn’t a light switch that can be flicked back on.
From sales leaders I’ve coached, “stop selling” is usually said in response to an overwhelm on the delivery side of the business whether that’s manufacturing, operations or engineering. Through our coaching sessions, we identified the three best practices for supporting our salespeople when they’re told to “stop selling.”
- Get proactive in communicating with opportunities in the funnel – getting our salespeople to proactively reach out to prospects in their funnel, especially those in the middle-to-bottom end, allows them to manage expectations and build rapport. Our salespeople will fear this call initially, but they will find that conversations with prospects that sound like, “our lead times have gone from eight weeks to 16 weeks, do you still want to keep talking about working together?” are easier to have than conversations with an angry customer who expected eight-week delivery and found out about 16-week delivery in week eight.
- Refer to the competition – another action that will cause anxiety in our salespeople; however, our clients have found that referring a prospect, or even a current client, to a competitor when they are unable to deliver raises their credibility long term. We want our salespeople to take this action after they asked, “do you still want to keep talking?” because our prospect may be willing to wait.
- Set a “jump the line” rate – on some of their proactive calls, our salespeople will discover that there are prospects in their funnel who will happily pay more for our services if they can jump the line and get delivery early (think of this like Amazon Prime for your business). Creating a “jump the line” rate with our salespeople and the delivery side of things who will need to shift production when one of our team closes a prospect wanting to jump the line, can increase our salespeople’s motivation to make proactive calls to their prospects.
Taking these three actions gives our sales team focus until the “stop selling” order is lifted. When it is, our funnel will still be full so the delivery side can keep rolling instead of sitting idly by while the sales team rebuilds the funnel.
Until next time… go lead.
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