Growth Dynamics Get Down

Hey, welcome back, it's Charlie Hauck, President, CEO, and head trainer at Growth Dynamics. Here is another one of our Friday Fast Tips. Today we have a quick lesson on business development execution.

I want to talk about a little sales strategy here and it's something that over the 30 plus years that I've been in this business, is one of the things that sort of annoys me more than anything else that I hear business development people doing out there. They do what I call "drive-by disqualify". They decide that it's not worth it to make that call, to pull into that driveway, to knock on the door, to go ask someone to have a business conversation.

Symptoms: 

Kyle loves selling. He also loves the company he works for and the products and lines he represents. His cup is filled by going to work every day and sharing with his prospects, suspects, and clients about what is new at in his professional world. With so much positivity, Kyle does well for himself, and his managers are pleased with his production. So, what’s the problem here?

Oh, boy, I don't even know why this topic is coming up a lot recently, but I've run into a lot of people that have, for some reason or another, the word fear has shown up in our conversations and coaching sessions. And so I thought I'd take time on this fast Friday tip to sort of dig into this idea of fear and share some thoughts with all of you.

As the calendar hits mid-June and I can hear the kids in the neighborhood celebrate the last day of the school year I ponder what they learned about life as well as their scholastic advancement. Those ideas provoke thoughts about what salespeople learn from one year to the next, or are they just repeating their earliest days in sales over and over, not really growing from the experiences along the way. So often when I am working with a sales team someone will complain about a prospect that will not return a call or a customer that expects to buy everything at the lowest possible price. Inevitably someone says that is just the way sales is and that complaining never makes it different. In other words, just live with it because that stuff just goes with the territory.

The next episode of Charlie & Company Talk Business, Life and Everything In Between is here. Charlie Hauck, president and owner of Growth Dynamics, and Sarah Waple, general manager, spend some time with Chuck Swope and Nicky Lyddane of SwopeLees Commercial Real Estate.

We've all heard it before- it's the market conditions that are making it hard for me to __________. Fill in that blank with any of your favorite or least favorite sales challenges- setting appointments, prospecting, closing, shipping, getting PO's, sending quotes or finding projects to quote. 

I am annoyed, but there is an upside to this annoyance. They are constructing a natural gas pipeline right outside my office, and I mean right outside my office, like 20 yards from my window. The noise is constant, and despite all the sound barriers they’ve constructed the noise is still annoying. And to make things worse, they don’t know when it will end. So, yes, I am annoyed.

Yesterday I sat in our monthly session of our High-Performance Sales Program with a room full of sales professionals and they were all talking about how rude many people have, in their eyes, become. One attendee even spoke about how an affiliate of their office questioned how she even acquired the contact’s phone number.