Why we FLOP: Part II – De Boer Consultancy SARL

Why do promising sales opportunities fizzle out before you have a chance to really get into the detail with the customer, to find out what makes them tick and agree the pain points which are solved by your product or service?

Because we FLOP. This short series of articles discusses four traps into which salespeople and commercial teams often fall, especially when under pressure to deliver quickly or when they are unsure of either their own product or how their product can meet the specific needs of the customer. This second article discusses two related behavioural traits which often scupper our chances of success.

L is for Lack of Confidence

Talking to customers can be daunting. Especially if you are meeting them for the first time, or if you are new to a particular market sector. It can also be daunting if you are selling a technical product and you don’t have a qualification or substantive experience in this particular technical field. It is obviously daunting if you are new to sales as a profession. And it is definitely a daunting prospect if you don’t fully understand the product you are selling.

There is a stereotype of salespeople as confident, sometimes even brash individuals. Blessed with the gift of the gab, or prone to verbal diarrhoea, depending on your viewpoint. Sales isn’t about talking. It isn’t really about pitching, although this is a valuable skill in itself. Every salesperson and marketer should be able to describe the purpose and value of their product in a succinct manner, be it within 30 seconds (the elevator pitch) or in language and concepts understandable to an eight-year-old. That isn’t the gift of the gab, it’s being properly trained and taking the time to really understand what it is you are selling.

Perversely, lack of confidence can often manifest itself as appearing overconfident. Resorting to bluster to compensate for not really being sure of what you are doing.

I learned an early lesson as a rookie publishing sales rep in my early twenties, when I confidently marched on to campus at the old UMIST in Manchester, and proceeded to try and have a peer-to-peer conversation on physics with a senior physics professor. With a mixture of fury and laughter, he literally chased me out of office and told me to leave the premises!

My mistake was in thinking I needed to have a deep understanding of physics to sell a physics textbook. I didn’t. I needed to understand how that professor taught his course, what was missing from his current teaching materials, and how our textbook and supporting materials could help to improve the delivery of his undergraduate course. As a generalist sales rep, selling across a wide portfolio of subject areas for a major U.S. academic publisher, I learned my lesson very, very quickly. I wasn’t confident enough in knowing and believing in the value I brought to the conversation with that physics professor – in this case, an understanding of the value of my product as a teaching aid, not how it advanced the field of physics. In my (partial) defence, this was the era when salespeople were often given a set of product brochures, the keys to their company car, and told to go out and start selling! Training was minimal.

The classic tell of a salesperson who lacks confidence is a rush to present their offering, without first understanding why the customer may be interested and what that customer needs to achieve. The salesperson ends up leading the conversation by waving their product in the air, or rushing the discovery part of the conversation, and then usually committing part one of the FLOP – feature dumping – followed by something along the lines of “OK, there it is… what do you think?” The passage of time and the evolution of technology hasn’t changed this fundamental pitfall.

Don’t rush to present your product. Take time to do the discovery work in your preparation for the conversation with your customer, and in the meeting itself. This is where you really add value, in showing the customer that you understand their needs and then showing how your product addresses these needs to deliver value. Be confident enough to hold things back a little.

O is for Oversharing

Or giving away too much too soon, particularly in terms of information. How often does a sales lead present itself as someone getting in touch with your company to “just get some information” or to “just get some pricing”? And how often do you give them what they (think they) want?

This is often a company-wide problem. Inbound sales leads arrive via customer service or marketing channels, and the person (or AI agent) triaging the enquiry dutifully provides the customer with a PDF flyer or, worse still, a price list. Job done. Especially if you want to sell on price and undercut your competition (and devalue the thing you and your competitors are offering, to the eventual detriment of everyone in the market).

But if you show anyone a price list, I promise you, their eyes will drift to the lowest rate of pricing, and from that point onwards they are trying to fit their interest in your product and manage their company’s expectations around that entry-level pricing rate. Negotiating upwards is one of the hardest things to do in business!

If this happens, the job of the salesperson has immediately become much, much harder. If you are lucky enough to actually receive the inbound lead, after your helpful colleague has provided information and pricing, and the prospect doesn’t just disappear never to be seen again, you now have to convince the customer why the information they have been given is actually wrong.

In solutions sales, the real revenue is in enterprise-level deals. Having a customer adopt your product or service across their organisation, engrained into their workflows and processes. This means you have to work really hard to build trust, explain how your offering specifically meets their needs, and establish value. This is potentially a substantial investment by the customer, perhaps with strategic implications. If they already have detailed information about your product before you speak with them and, worse still, they have pricing, they have already started to make decisions about the relevance of your product and the value you offer – with no input from you. Good luck winning that business without leaving most of the money on the table!

So please, be brave. Don’t rush to present and definitely don’t rush to share your pricing. Transparency doesn’t mean you are obliged to provide detailed information or appropriate pricing before the customer has given you some of their time in a conversation to discuss their interest, share their pain points and explain what – for them – would represent a successful solution.