Sales Tip: Stick to your plan

A sales career would be pretty easy, but boring, if all you had to do was walk in the customer's door, say hello, give your presentation, ask for the order and have the customer say yes. Depending on how you look at the challenge of sales, fortunately or unfortunately this quick and easy sales scenario seldom, if ever, happens. 

In the real world what often happens is you walk in the shop door with a planned sales presentation for your customers, you drop off the latest promotional brochure at each workstation and then everything that could go wrong does go wrong from the get-go.  

The entire shop is upset about some new rule the workers don’t like or some hot-topic union issue and no one wants to hear about your cool new tools. So, with each of your personal calls within the shop you must hear about that person's take on the latest grievance. Or, it seems like every one of your technicians is dealing with some major subject they must unload on you before you can get through with your selling business. The list of subjects can go on forever: kids, spouse, money, health, sports, weather, broken tools, lousy boss, government, religion, etc.  

Additionally, customers have a knack for changing the subject during a demonstration, wanting to tell you their latest life story, or answering a phone call during your demo. Essentially, a presentation almost never goes on a straight line from, "Hello" to the demonstration, to questions, to agreement, and to a sale. Every sales call can turn into a “Long and Winding Road” to reach a final yes or no conclusion. 

Here’s a diagram of how you would like your sales call to go. 

1. Hello    2. Product Demonstration   3. Q & A Session  4. Close  5. Customer says yes   6. $$$  

In reality, here’s a winding road diagram of how sales calls really go. The green line is what you planned for the presentation discussion and the red line is how the discussion goes, winding all-around topics such as money problems, sports talks, broken tools, and more money problems. 

These uncontrollable situations and interruptions happen every day and the better you deal with them the better your sales results will be. 

Since you walked in the door with a sales plan in mind for your various customers it is important for you to keep those plans as you visit each customer. 

You probably know each individual customer well enough to know who is going to complain the most about whatever is going on in the shop and who will not even mention it. Prepare yourself to take control of the discussion quickly and keep it on track.