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My sales are very bad, what should I do?

What stops sales people from qualifying bad deals out early?

  • It's often said that if you're going to lose, you had better lose early, and move on to another more promising opportunity. So what causes sales people to cling on to unwinnable deals?

  • Answer:

    I feel there are a few potential reasons depending on the individual sales person. Lack of experience - less experienced sales people may not have developed a feel for qualifying deals to see if the customer actually needs the product and has budget for the purchase in addition to make sure the customer decision maker is involved and planning to make a purchase in reasonable time frame. Lack of management guidance - This is what sales managers are supposed to be checking.  Some may not be digging deep enough into their teams' pipeline to make sure that they're working on real qualified deals.  Moreover, they should be checking every stage of the pipeline, not just qualification, to ensure an accurate and healthy pipeline. A bad pipeline - It may not be the salesperson's fault.  In some cases, they maybe getting low quality leads, or trying to sell a bad product.  In these cases, they're holding on to poor quality deals because they don't have enough high quality leads to work on. Urge to win every deal - Many sales people are very competive and pride themselves on their ability to "sell ice cream to eskimos."  So a few may try to win every deal.  This can be a counterproductive behavior that keeps them from cycling out low-odds deals.  The best sales people are expert on prioritizing and closing great deals not turning bad leads into good deals.

Alex Salazar at Quora Visit the source

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Other answers

Inexperience.  Need go no further than Alex Salazar's first answer.

Peter Mullen

It is often the undisciplined manifestation of a required trait for selling: optimism or positivism. You want salespeople selling for you with that trait, but the systems to prevent them from unproductive behavior.

Dave Stein

Failure on the part of management.  Either the management hasn't sufficiently explained the sales model in use, or they haven't explained the differences between well-qualified and poorly-qualified opportunities.  Then, when the poorly-qualified deal gets into the funnel, they aren't digging deep enough to discover it and get it out of there. Ultimately, they cost the salesperson a lot of selling time.  They risk angering the client, who could be a well-qualified lead on another product or at another time.  They cheapen the product, doing damage to their brand and their team's morale, by "buying" low-margin deals with poorly-qualified clients instead of focusing on clients that will see the appropriate value...this reduction in perceived value is very costly.

Scot MacTaggart

For all these reasons and more, sellers don't feel they can or should walk away from a prospect. But there are many situations where they should! This recording from a CONNECT! radio broadcast explains when and how to stop calling on a prospect. http://peoplefirstps.com/connect-when-should-you-give-up-on-a-prospect/

Deb Calvert

The most unrelenting reason that sales people don't qualify leads from the get go is that lead qualification can be a very time-consuming process, without the right tools. The BANT system provides essential criteria for qualified leads. But how can you ease the process of getting the answers to this criteria? The use of sales intelligence tools makes the lives of salespeople much easier. They can gather information from a variety of sources by using robust software. http://colabo.com/qualify_leads_now_v2.php helps sales professionals qualify leads by gathering information from sources such as LinkedIn, Quora, Salesforce, and more (the selection is fully customizable). I encourage you to check out the Free Trial and/or request a demo. http://colabo.com/contact_us.php

May Igawa

It is the inability to identify and forecast, parameters that are important to calculate - lead demographics and psycho-graphics, decision matrix of the account, calculation of the spend possible based on past buying behavior and choices of solutions, etc. These inabilities can be countered through persistent efforts to solve these issues at a personal end, by every salesperson.

Soumik Ganguly

Sales directors who insist on seeing a 'pipeline' without drilling into the details - quantity more important than quality.Sales people then clutch at straws to keep the boss happy.

Mailan Henning

…Happy Ears... They Got them Happy Ears... …Seriously, I think its either over-confidence caused by inexperience or really their own understanding of what constitutes a qualified opportunity in their respective market. This should be caught at sales management level and weeded out. But hey, it doesn't always happen.

Justyn Roberts

Impatience Inexperience Seeing what they want to see The blind believe that going through numbers (any numbers) will produce the desired results Pre-judgement

Garrick Saito

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