Why sales people don't close as much as they could? 5 reasons

Is there a bullet proof recipe for 100% closing?

The closing. Ah, the famous closing. At the risk of being blunt, my perception is that the closing is a myth. A bit like Father Christmas.

On the other hand, there are plenty of reasons why a deal doesn't get signed. Pages and pages could be written. There are a lot of dynamics that, better managed, could help a sales professional close better.

So, even if there is no 'bulletproof' recipe, regardless of the industry you work on, if you work in B2B, here are 5 reasons why you can't get a deal moving properly or close it. And what to do about it.

You don't have a robust methodology.

I've stopped counting the number of managers who tell me they have a process, KPIs, gates, etc... and yet they don't get the results their products or services deserve. They've read the books, watched the videos on Youtube and so on and yet they're stuck. One of the roots of the problem is that they lack a methodology. A methodology is not a process. It's a set of fundamental principles about prospect-customer interaction that guide how these interactions are managed by sales people. I can't go into all the details here, but for example, the majority of salespeople focus on results. They want to close. That's their focus. Yet, whether their prospect decides to buy their product or service is completely out of their control.

It's not the result that they can control, but how they communicate, how they ask questions and what they do, whether they are interested rather than interesting, etc.... The what and how of their activities is what sales people control and what enables them to develop a trusting advisor relationship, which is essential in sales (more details here).

We could write pages and pages on a good sales methodology. But one of the (many) important principles to incorporate into a methodology is to have a healthy dose of scepticism about everything your prospects tell you. Not that prospects are bad. Humans and your prospects are fundamentally good. But the reality is people are allowed to lie to sales people. It's part of the "game". I'm still looking for the prospect who lies to a sales rep, walks out of the meeting and can't sleep at night because they didn't tell the truth...

You educate your prospects. You don 't sell.

Selling is counter-intuitive and all too often, salespeople are trained about all the intricacies of the product and service. So they are able to answer customers' questions. The value of a sales person is not based on their ability to provide information to prospects. It's based on their ability to extract it.

Yet, what do 95%, if not more, of organisations do when they take on a salesperson? They train them on the product. Phenomenal mistake. They essentially develop a comfort zone among their sales staff. They know the product or service inside out and are able to educate their prospects about it. Rather than ask powerful and insightful questions.

This inevitably leads to the frustration many CROs / Heads of Sales have: "They don't understand their prospects very well". A sales manager we work with at the time of writing this article is in the process of recruiting a team and was telling me about the need to train them on the (complex) product for a few weeks. When I asked him if he'd given up on the idea of not training them on the product, the CEO who was present at our conversation nodded approvingly...

You're not empathetic enough:

Now I'm getting into the clichés. Everyone says it. But frankly, very few people know how to be empathetic. There are a lot of things that fall into the "empathy pie" for lack of better expression.

Let's start by the way sales people communicate what they do. Most of the time, when asked about what they do, sales people go on a long rant about their products and services. How good the product/service is, the benefits it brings, etc. Yet, sadly, their prospects don't give a hoot about this.

So one of the keys to empathy is to stop talking about oneself, right from the start of a conversation with a prospect.

You're too empathetic.

What? But you just said the exact opposite? Good point, there is good and bad empathy. If selling was simple, well, everybody would succeed… What I mean by this is that all too often, during a sales meeting, the sales person wants to be introduced to other people. But the prospect says "it's not possible to introduce you to X, Y, Z". With X, Y, Z the people who, for example, sign the cheque. Because "blah blah blah" with blah blah blah a whole list of excuses. Well, in that case, stop empathising and understand the person you are talking to. If the prospect doesn't want to introduce the sales person to other stakeholders, there are typically two options.

1. Either the trust isn't there. As a sales person, you didn't do what was needed to earn the right to talk to other people.

2. Or he/she can't make an effort at this stage. Because it's not important to them, they don't truly want to solve the issue. And they won't make an effort later, particularly at the mythical "closing" stage.

So if the prospect can't do what is needed to move forward, and assuming you've done all necessary to build trust, walk away. Never do anything for free. But above all, don't have the wrong empathy with the prospect in "understanding" a conversation with other stakeholders can't be set-up.

You've got your superhero cape:

There's this myth, another one, that a sales person has to know everything about everything (well, about their product and service, I mean). He's got this superhero cape with all the answers.

Now, I don't know about you, but for me, someone who has all the answers, who tries to blind me with his knowledge of the techno thingy, the machine learning thingy, the SEO thingy, the x, y, z finance tool, etc... frankly, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. As we say "Nobody likes a smart arse". In French we say "personne n'aime un sachant". And this hurts closing rates.

There is a lot of value in developing a relationship by being vulnerable and not knowing it all. We humans are hard-wired to want to help others. So if we offer the possibility to our prospect to help us, it helps to develop this relationship of trust.

So during your interactions, don't hesitate to use that magic phrase: "I don't know" or even to ask your prospects for help. It's a difficult line to navigate, because on the one hand your prospect needs to have confidence in you and your ability to help them. On the other, they don't want to deal with a "smart arse". So think about your process and what are the stages where your prospect's expertise, injected into your methodology, can help him to make this process his own and therefore encourage him to make a personal investment.

There you go. There's plenty more to say but if you have a clear methodology that you apply consistently, without finding excuses to deviate from it, if you stop educating them with your demos and presentations, if you stop talking about yourself (really), if you stop taking what they say at face value and are able to show your vulnerable side, then you won't "close" all your deals but you might have one or two more opportunities that will go to closing stage.