Debunking Sales Myths with Mike Schultz #216

Selling has changed tremendously in the last 10 years. But prospecting has changed even more. Previous research suggests that 57 percent of the purchase decision is complete before a customer calls a supplier. This gives sellers the false impression that buyers don’t want or need to talk to them early in the buying process. They do! Mike Schultz visits Sales Babble for clarifying and debunking these sales myths with advice based on hard research.

Some Common Sales Myths

Rain Group is a sales research institute just completed a study on prospecting. They talked to 488 buyers, asking them what is the process they have used for past purchases.

They study found it’s a sales myth that buyers don’t want to talk to sellers, eg. 67% sale done digitally. But this should slow sellers down. 71% of buyers said they want to talk to sellers at the early part of their research. They want context. With too many choices it becomes to difficult for buyers to choose “Its the ‘paradox of choice” according to Barry Schwartz.

Myth cold calling is dead. Greater than 50% of buyers prefer to be contacted by the telephone. It is second only to email. Of the buyers researched, 57% have had the seller reach out to them on the phone.
82% of buyers take meetings with people they don’t know but have talked to on the phone.
Buyers need inspiration, start with your existing clients.

What Winners Do

It’s a myth that buyers don’t want to hear about capabilities and only benefits. The #1 content buyers want is features and capabilities. It’s buyers primary research on their industry. They want descriptions of the capabilities in context. They desire content customized 100% to their business Not mass mail merges.

Great Sellers WAVE

Winners Mindset – The Mindset of a winner is strategic, not tactics only.
Attraction Campaign – multistep and modal approach to reach out and connect to buyers. The number of attempts to reach a prospect should be 8 (not 3).
Value – Get prospects to say wow that could be worthwhile (to have a call, meet, agree to demonstration or buy).
Execution -Winners do all the tactical parts. They take action to turn around objections. They exercise executive functions to stay focused in a noisy world. They have the ability to concentrate and focus for prospecting (which is the hardest thing to do).

Cold meetings that have a value approach will turn deals into wins. When sellers focus on value, 96% said it was influential. They want to be educated and collaborative >90%. Yet the meetings must be interesting and add value. Most sales meetings are not valuable to most buyers. If they are impressive they will buy things.