This analysis is already being used for the next election in 2014. For those of us in the sales business, the presidential election can teach us a lot about how to motivate people, how to close the deal and how to make the most efficient use of customer data to help nurture sales leads.

Below are a few lessons from the U.S. presidential election that sales people should take to heart

Sales Lessons From The Presidential Election

Reward Your Most Loyal and Enthusiastic Customers

Every presidential campaign is an exercise in “rallying the base” – presidential campaigns don’t usually try to persuade voters from the other party. Instead, they focus much of their resources on trying to motivate and inspire the voters from their own party who were already likely to vote.

The reason is simple: By rallying the base, political campaigns can get their most dedicated supporters to give money, volunteer and spread the message of the campaign on social media in a way that will hopefully reach more voters than television ads could.

In the same way, sales people need to constantly build relationships with existing customers. Who are your most loyal customers? These are your organization’s “base,” those more likely to refer you to their friends and colleagues. Instead of trying to constantly introduce your company to new sales leads, who might not know anything about you and might be hesitant to take your call, you might get better sales results by “rallying the base.”

Reach out to loyal customers who have bought from you before (and who have referred you to others).

Back to Basics Tactics Often Bring the Biggest Results

There is a new book about the surprisingly successful tactics of presidential campaigns called “The Victory Lab,” which discusses how some of the most “old fashioned” and mundane campaign tactics can have the biggest results.

For example, two of the ways that have proven most effective at boosting voter turnout are personal door knocking and phone calls from volunteers. Not robo-calls or television ads. There are many parallels like this between the worlds of politics and sales. Many sales people get caught up in technology and rely too heavily on their customer relationship management system and other tools.

While technology is important, one of the biggest ways to ensure sales success is to keep doing the mundane. The less exciting work of dialing prospects and setting up appointments and working through the sales cycle.

Know Your Customers

In the 2012 presidential election, both the Obama campaign and Romney campaign were trying to reach a narrow sliver of undecided voters. These two “brands” were basically competing for the same tiny pool of “customers,” trying to close the deal on election day.

One of the most important tasks for each campaign was to conduct internal polling and tracking to make sure they were targeting the right voters. It does no good for a campaign to spend money and time talking to voters who were already going to vote for the other candidate. Accuracy in the collection and analysis of this “customer data” is one of the most underrated aspects of the modern presidential campaign.

In the same way, sales people need to make sure they understand their own customer data by focusing on the right metrics and analytics. Just like a campaign has internal polling that helps them focus attention on the right voters, your company needs to identify the most promising prospects at each stage of the sales cycle. So you don’t waste time, effort and resources trying to sell to people who aren’t ready to buy or who aren’t the right fit.

In many ways, sales is a more forgiving business than presidential politics. There is not just one “winner” in sales. Even if you fail to close the deal with a customer today, you can make up for it tomorrow.

But there are many lessons that sales people can learn from the results and process of the 2012 presidential election: rally the base, get back to basics on your sales tactics and use technology and data analysis to focus your efforts on the right sales prospects at each stage of the sales cycle.

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The content and design of your website can make the difference between converting website visits to sales leads, and missing out on big opportunities from prospects who quietly scan through your site, but then leave without making their presence known.

Here are a few ways to make sure your website is sending the right messages to build trust and turn more of your website visitors into promising sales leads:

Make Sure Your Website Design is Up to Date and Easy to Navigate

The fastest way to lose the trust of your website visitors is for your website design to be out-of-date, clunky or hard to navigate.

Ideally, your website should offer a clean, simple design that is easy for the reader to quickly scan through. Avoid flashy designs and “bells and whistles.” Make it easy for your website visitors to see the key messages and click through to the places you want them to go to invite further contact – whether it’s requesting a free quote, or offering a free download in exchange for their e-mail addresses.

Start a Blog and Update it Regularly

If you don’t already have a company blog, you should definitely start one and keep it updated with fresh content.

The reason: Having a blog is one of the most important ways to drive regular, recurring traffic to your website.

When people come to your site, they need to have something to read that lets them know you’re still in business and still actively commenting on your industry’s latest issues and trends. Another advantage of using a blog for inbound lead generation is that every single blog article helps to create a “long tail” of keywords and content that prospective customers can find, often months or years after you first published the article.

It’s great to publish blog content about the latest news and issues in your industry, but it also helps to publish some “evergreen” content about more general topics – advice, “top 10 lists,” informative infographics or commentary about what your company learned from a recent project or a recent customer challenge.

Include Real-Life Success Stories From Your Customers

One of the first questions your prospective customers are asking themselves when they visit your site is:

“Will this company keep its promises? Are their solutions real? Will I get a good result from hiring them?”

You can put your prospects’ minds at ease by offering real-life case studies from some of your recent customers. Show your website visitors the real stories of what your company does and how you help your customers achieve success, and you’ll be more likely to get casual website visitors to ask to hear more from you.

Add Client testimonials with Real Names

Client testimonials are one of the most powerful ways to build credibility on your website – but you need to use real names of your clients and your clients’ companies. If you only include anonymous or generic names of companies, like “XYZ Corporation,” that does not build credibility. If anything, it undermines your credibility because your website visitors will be asking themselves:

“Why can’t they use real company names? What are they trying to hide?”

Ideally, you want to make it easy for your prospective customers to be able to contact your clients who have given testimonials on your website. If a prospect is serious about doing business with you, they will take time to reach out to one of your former clients to ask about the experience.

That is actually a good thing.  Only prospects that are thinking of hiring you will contact testimonials.

If your website can win the trust of your visitors, you’ll be more likely to motivate them to ask for more information or for a follow-up call. You don’t have to close a deal with your website. Most B2B sales organizations have a longer sales cycle than that.

But your website can help you harvest a much higher yield of inbound sales leads if it does a thorough job of answering the most important question on your prospect’s mind:

“Can I trust this company?”

Web Credibility Photo via Shutterstock

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Your challenge as a sales leader is to help your sales team avoid driving away customers with this kind of neediness by reducing their sales stress.

To reduce your sales stress, you need to focus on all the activities that lead up to closing a deal, and build a strong pipeline that protects you against the loss of a big account or the last-minute collapse of a promising deal.

Here are 5 ways to reduce sales stress for you and your sales team:

Maintain A Full Calendar of New Business Development

If your sales team is busy managing existing accounts and closing deals with repeat customers, it can be hard to persuade them to spend more time on prospecting. But the truth is, unless your sales people are regularly meeting with new business prospects, they are vulnerable to suddenly having the rug swept out from under them when their “busy” times come to a stop.

Being a sales person is like being a juggler – you have to keep multiple balls in the air at the same time; keeping your existing clients happy while also introducing a steady amount of new business prospects into your daily mix of activities. By always maintaining a pipeline of new sales opportunities on the horizon, your sales team can stay busier, happier and more profitable.

How does this reduce your sales stress? If you know that you always have multiple opportunities on the horizon, you’ll be less likely to “overdo it” in pursuing any of your current prospects. It takes the pressure off to know that even if one promising prospect doesn’t pan out, you still have many other people waiting to hear from you.

Take It One Day At A Time

Make prospecting into a daily habit. Do a little bit of prospecting work every single day you are at your desk. Even if you only have time for 30 minutes of calls, make sure you dial them. Depending on your sales conversion rates, a certain number of dials will lead to a certain number of appointments, which leads to a certain number of sales – but you can’t get the sales without making the dials.

Breaking up your prospecting into a daily repeatable routine helps reduce sales stress by lowering the stakes for every prospecting call. If prospecting is something you do every day, automatically, it becomes a low-stress, low-pressure activity – just part of your regular routine; nothing to get worked up about.

Instead of procrastinating and suddenly having to make a long list of high-stakes prospecting calls, daily prospecting helps you build a better pipeline that lowers the pressure for any individual sales call.

Be Prepared

Every sales call requires you to do your homework. Have a plan for the call. Know why you are calling, know who you will be talking to, and know what you want to say to them. More importantly, be prepared to listen attentively to the prospect and uncover additional needs based on what the prospect is saying.

Understand what you are hoping to accomplish with each call, whether it’s getting a sales appointment, offering a sales proposal, or finalizing a time to meet to discuss closing the deal. Being prepared will reduce your sales stress because you will feel more in control of the situation, ready for any questions or objections that the prospect might raise.

It’s the difference between being a kid in school who didn’t do his homework and is trying to fake his way through the final exam, and a kid who came prepared and aces the exam with confidence. Who would you rather be?

Don’t Assume Too Much

Many sales people make the mistake of assuming that every so-called “qualified” sales lead is completely ready to buy. Unfortunately, different sales prospects have different standards of “ready to buy.” Some prospects might have indicated an interest in your solution just as a way of getting off the phone with whoever was making the lead generation calls. Other prospects might be interested in getting more information from you, but are not yet actively in the market for your solution.

Approach your list of “qualified” sales prospects with the expectation that you’re still going to have to do some work to build relationships, uncover customer needs, and align your solution with those specific needs. Managing your assumptions helps reduce your sales stress because it makes it easier to go with the flow.

If you go into a conversation expecting to have to build relationships, you’ll be better able to handle questions and objections along the way.

Keep Following Up

Many sales people make the mistake of only focusing on the highest-potential short-term sales leads because these are often more likely to buy now. But as part of building a strong sales pipeline, you also need to nurture your long-term sales leads.

Keep following up every few months with sales leads that had expressed an interest, or even the ones that initially said they were “not interested.” Circumstances can change at every company, and even a “not interested” prospect can become interested as their business needs evolve. Keeping up the daily, weekly and monthly routines of following up with sales leads can reduce your sales stress by uncovering unexpected opportunities, even from sales leads that your competitors might have overlooked.

Regular sales lead nurturing also helps reduce sales stress by making these activities part of the standard sales routine. Instead of a high-stakes, high-pressure, do-or-die sales pitch, your conversations can take on more of a friendly air of a trusted industry peer and colleague just checking in. Which conversation would you most like to be part of?

Sales can be a stressful job, but true sales professionals find a way to take control of the situation and reduce their stress levels by doing the incremental work every day of setting appointments, following up with sales leads, and dialing the phone.

If you approach the sales process as a long-term endeavor instead of a high-stakes last-minute do-or-die conversation, you can significantly reduce your sales stress and increase your sales conversion rate.

Stress Photo via Shutterstock

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At a time when prospects are feeling overwhelmed with too much to do, too little time, and too many bad cold calls, your sales team can stand out from the competition by learning how to build trust.

By avoiding the pitfalls of a canned sales pitch and giving prospects a reason to listen, you can build stronger sales relationships that lead to better conversions and bigger profits.

Here are a few ways that your small business can build trust with sales prospects:

Do Your Homework

Too many sales reps pick up the phone and start making sales calls without really knowing anything about the person they’re calling. Don’t go into a sales call flying blind.

Before your sales reps pick up the phone, they need to know who they are calling and why. The easiest way to build trust is to show the prospect that they’re not just another name on a calling list. Show them that you know something about their company, you know the industry, and you have a specific reason for why you thought they would like to hear from you today.

Ask Questions

Instead of making the classic mistake of launching into a canned sales script that will quickly cause the prospect’s eyes to glaze over, your sales reps need to ask questions to provoke a thoughtful response.

For example, instead of jumping the gun by telling the prospect, “We can help you improve productivity by 15% and reduce your costs by 20%,” lead into the value proposition by asking the prospect open ended questions such as, “What is the biggest challenge facing your business (related to our solution)?” Or, “How would you feel if your team could achieve a significant productivity boost at a lower cost?”

Listen for Unstated Needs

Sales people often make the mistake of steering the conversation in one direction, and then when the prospect says “no” or “not interested,” the sales rep has nowhere else to go and has to end the call.

Instead of getting shut down, talented sales reps know how to “read between the lines” of a conversation to find hidden opportunities. Prospects will rarely tell you flat out, “This is what we need, and this is what we’re willing to pay.” Instead, your sales team needs to uncover the prospect’s needs by delving deeper into the conversation and really listening to what the prospect has to say.

Offer Something Valuable

Every time you or your sales reps talk to a customer or prospective customer, that conversation is an opportunity to show the prospect that you genuinely care about their challenges and that you want to be seen as a trusted industry peer and colleague.

Instead of just breezing through a sales script and asking for a sale, the most credible sales reps know how to offer the prospect something of value without tying it to the expectation of a sale. Could you offer your prospects some valuable business intelligence or thoughts on industry trends? Offer to share a white paper or presentation with them? Share a success story from a similar company in their industry?

All of these little acts of generosity are building blocks for a more trusting relationship and possibly an eventual sale.

Take Your Time

One of the most common mistakes in B2B sales is when overeager sales reps ask for the sale too soon. Or they get discouraged by “not interested” responses and let long-term sales leads languish without any follow-up. B2B sales leads need to be nurtured and managed over a long period of time, sometimes months or years, depending on your sales cycle.

One of the best ways to build trust is to show your prospects that you are in it for the long haul and are willing to develop a sold working relationship with them over time – you’re not just swooping in for a quick sale. If you show prospects that you are committed to their success and you’re willing to keep talking with them for the long-term, they’ll be more likely to trust you and eventually buy from you.

Some of the most valuable business relationships require nurturing, time, an investment of resources, and that most important ingredient of all, trust. The reason B2B sales leads are so valuable and elusive is because they are worth much more than simple transactional one-off sales – each B2B sales relationship has the potential to deliver significant profits to your company.

For this reason, it’s worth investing some time and attention to build trust with your prospects.

Building Trust Photo via Shutterstock

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This is a big mistake. Sales people can’t assume that the sales presentation will take care of itself, or that they can “think on their feet” and talk off the top of their heads.

If you spend hours making dozens of lead generation calls and building relationships with clients and narrowing down your sales funnel, then you need to invest at least that much time in preparing for your sales presentations.

Here are 5 easy steps to creating more effective sales presentations:

Write It Down

Put your entire sales presentation in writing. Write like you talk. Keep it short and simple, but make sure to include as much specific detail as necessary. Imagine that you’re having a conversation with a client right across the table from you – what would you say? Which key points do you most want to emphasize? What are the biggest benefits to the customer of choosing your solution or product or service?

Create An Outline

In addition to the full scripted sales presentation, write a shorter outline to serve as a guide. This outline can be used to help you prepare and memorize the script, and it can also be used as a “leave-behind” document to give the prospect something to keep as a record of your conversation.

Think Of Questions And Objections

As part of writing your scripted presentation, give some thought to what the client might say in response at each stage of the script. Pretend you’re writing a dialogue or a movie scene with you and the client each acting out your roles. What questions or objections have you heard from other clients in the past? What are the biggest sticking points or aspects of your solution that people struggle to understand? How can you help clarify any misunderstandings?

Practice, Practice, Practice

Prepare for your sales presentation by reciting the entire script, out loud. Deliver the presentation to at least two other colleagues on the sales team and ask them to tell you what they think. Practice by doing some role playing, where one person plays the part of the customer – this creates a more realistic sense of back-and-forth, asking questions and raising objections. Record yourself delivering the presentation – either in audio format or better yet, in video format so you can see your body language and delivery. One of the best ways to get better as a presenter is to watch yourself speak.

Get Ready For The Room

Make sure you’re familiar with the environment that you’ll be in, whether you’re going to be delivering your sales presentation to a small audience, a conference room or an auditorium, and prepare your materials accordingly. Bring enough printed documents and business cards to hand out to everyone in the room. Make sure your slideshow works. Arrive early to set up. Be prepared to adjust the seating arrangement or layout of the room to suit your needs and “make the room your own.”

Many sales people wrongly have the notion that if they prepare a sales presentation, they will sound “too scripted.” The truth is, nothing is more natural-sounding than a well-prepared sales presentation.

If you have a clear idea of how you want the presentation to go, what you want to say, and how to respond to questions and objections along the way, you will sound more professional and credible than a sales person who stumbles along, improvising through an unstructured presentation.

You owe it to yourself and your customers to prepare a solid sales presentation. Once you have a standard sales presentation in writing, you can adjust it to suit the specific details and needs of each customer on your appointment list.

Sales Steps Photo via Shutterstock

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Many inexperienced lead generation staff tend to make the mistake of asking for the sale too soon, talking about budget too directly, and assuming that the prospect is immediately ready to talk about closing a deal.

Instead of jumping the gun, play a longer-term game by asking specific follow-up questions to uncover more information, build credibility and deepen your relationship with the prospect.

Here are my three favorite lead qualification questions that can help your sales staff get farther into the sales process and maximize your chances of success with every sales prospect on your calling list:

1. Was there a compelling event that caused you to request information from us?

The reason to ask this question is to find out more about the prospect’s reasons for ending up on your list of sales leads. Are they unhappy with their current vendor, shopping around for a new solution to keep up with a competitor, or trying to upgrade or replace an inadequate situation?

What was the serious problem, point of pain or “last straw” that made them want to have this conversation with your sales team?

If the prospect can clearly identify a compelling event, your sales team can position your product or solution to respond to those circumstances. Link your solutions to the prospect’s specific “pain” issues.

Of course, not all prospects have such a clear and visible cause that motivates them to seek out your solution. They might only have vague ideas or a general sense that something isn’t right, or they might just be curious to shop around and see what solutions are available on the market. If the prospect does not identify a clear “compelling event,” then your sales team will have to invest some time in educating the prospect to help them recognize the specific problems that they are trying to solve, and show them how your solution can help them.

2. What is the most important thing you hope to accomplish by solving this problem?

Even if a prospect didn’t have a clear event that occurred, causing the motivation to talk with your sales team, they often will have a clearer idea of where they want your solution to take them. By asking this question, you can help the prospect visualize what they want to achieve.

This is part of the process of helping the process understand the benefits of your solution and the ROI that your solution can deliver – by talking about accomplishments, you are helping the prospect think not in terms of “how much they have to pay” but “what they will receive” from your solution.

Another benefit of asking this qualification question is that it shows your sales team how serious the prospect and his/her organization are about investigating your solution and understanding the value. If the prospect doesn’t have a clear answer for what they hope to accomplish, this could indicate that they are not ready to make a purchase or are just doing preliminary price shopping.

3. It sounds like you could benefit from our solution. What would you like to see happen as a next step?

Instead of pushing to close the deal, this question serves to invite the prospect into the sales process by putting the ball in their court. You give the prospect the courtesy of allowing them a degree of control over what happens next – and this tactic often helps prospects feel more relaxed and receptive to moving forward in the sales process.

Sales people often prefer to maintain control of the process, so this technique can feel risky, but the truth is that asking this kind of question can give your sales team some valuable insight into the customer’s thinking, and see where the customer is in the buying process. You might hear, “We’re not sure what we want to happen next,” or “We’re not ready to move forward,” but more often than not, putting some control in the prospect’s hands can help move the sales process along faster than you might expect.

Qualifying sales leads doesn’t happen overnight, and it requires thoughtful questions and listening to the subtext of what prospects are telling you. Use your sales qualification questions as a chance to probe deeper into the prospect’s thought process and learn more about how their organization hopes to benefit from your solution.

By asking the right questions, you’ll get to the deal closing table faster than aggressively and immediately asking to close the sale.

Jump the Gun Photo via Shutterstock

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What’s wrong with writing sales proposals? 

The problem with writing sales proposals is that every one of your competitors also sees it as a “victory” to get to the proposal process – and so every sales proposal has to compete with several (dozen, hundred?) other written proposals. All this proposal writing can be counterproductive if too many of your proposals get caught up in “no man’s land” between the prospect saying “no” and “yes.” Instead of mindlessly churning out sales proposals, cultivate a larger sense of strategy and discipline in your B2B lead generation.

Ocean Trawling vs. Spearfishing

Too often, the act of writing sales proposals becomes an act of “mass production.” Sales people crank out sales proposals without customizing the offer to the prospect’s specific needs. Don’t blindly pitch a pre-packaged system that might not be what the client wants or needs. And don’t confuse the manic “energy” of proposal writing with actual “results.”

Your sales team might spend days writing sales proposals, leading to only a tiny percentage of deals. Proposal writing needs to hold up to the same measurement and scrutiny as any other sales activities.

Think of this analogy from the fishing industry – an ocean trawler vs. a simple spearfisher. Instead of taking an indiscriminate “ocean trawler” approach – sending out sales proposals left and right and siphoning up as many leads as possible with no sense of strategic direction – you need to take a “spearfisher” approach by choosing a sales target, planning your effort and following up with patience and diligence. Smart sales lead management is an exercise in “Ready, Aim, Fire.” Churning out sales proposals, too often, is an exercise in “Fire, Fire, Fire.”

As a sales person, it’s natural to be impatient for action. We thrive on making the calls and getting in front of the customers, and doing what it takes to close the deal.  But the problem is, too many sales people convey this sense of impatience in their sales proposal writing. If you’re not careful in listening to the prospect’s needs and aligning your offer with those needs, the sales proposal is going to need to be resubmitted again and again. (Even worse, the prospect might lose patience with you, and call off the conversation.) Spend less time writing and re-writing proposals, and spend more time asking the right questions to qualify the sales leads in the first place.

Of course, asking questions and investing time in appointment setting, qualifying leads and building relationships takes hard work. It’s far easier to just keep writing sales proposals and “look busy.”

Here’s what happens with lazy proposal writing:

• The client says “No” to the first draft of the proposal.
• Instead of digging deeper into the client’s needs by asking questions, reading between the lines and honing in on the underlying objections, the sales person gets impatient. (“But I just KNOW this client is ready to buy! We are so close to making a deal!”)
• Driven by impatience, the sales person starts rewriting the sales proposal, adding more bells and whistles, and offering more services, systems and products to the client in the hope that something will make a difference and close the deal.
• The sales person thinks that all these proposals are bringing them closer to the client, but the truth is, they’re just pushing the client away. Prospects can smell desperation a mile away. The prospect is thinking, “This sales person doesn’t understand our needs and doesn’t seem interested enough to ask. I’m going to talk to one of their competitors.”

Another Problem with Proposals: No commitment

Every sales process needs a series of clear commitments being requested from the prospect, starting with the earliest cold calls and appointment setting follow-up calls. “Will you agree to meet with me?” “Will you agree to receive a price quote?” “Will you agree to commit to a purchase?”

The problem with many sales proposals is that they don’t directly ask the buyer to take action. The proposals just arrive, and too often…sit there. When was the last time a client immediately called back and agreed to buy, based on a few words on paper? And no matter how persuasive your proposal, it can’t answer any unanticipated follow-up questions.

Without a sales person accompanying the sales proposal, nothing will happen. Instead of simply sending sales proposals, first do some appointment setting calls to arrange a time to discuss the details. Too often, decision makers overlook the most important details of the sales proposal. (Or worse – they only focus on the price and reject your offer without understanding the value proposition.) The sales person needs to be there to guide prospects through the offer, respond to questions, and ask other questions to delve deeper into the prospect’s specific needs.

Don’t rely on a piece of paper or numbers on a screen to close the deal for you. Instead, look for opportunities to create selling moments based on real human interactions between the sales person and the prospect. Simply sending a sales proposal is too passive. Accompanying a sales proposal with a sales appointment is a dynamic process that engages the ideas of two people.

Sending sales proposals invites rejection. It’s all too easy for a prospect to say “No” to a simple sales proposal in their inbox. Instead of limiting yourself to “Yes or No” by sending sales proposals, use smart appointment setting and in-person follow-up to create more wide-ranging conversations of “What-if and why-not?”

Spear Fishing Photo via Shutterstock

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Some of these traits are true, while some can be counter-productive if left unchecked. But one surprising lesson I’ve learned from my years of experience in the appointment setting industry is that some of the best sales people don’t act at all like the stereotypical “good sales person.”

If you want to boost the performance of your sales team, you might want to consider taking a new approach and training your sales people to say some of these surprising things that you wouldn’t expect a sales person to say:

“I don’t know the answer to that question.”

Sales people often pride themselves on knowing all the answers. They want to quickly be able to solve a client’s problem and put a prospect’s mind at ease. The problem is, if your sales people are too quick to provide “the answer,” they are missing opportunities to dive deeper into the prospect’s problem and identify the root cause of the prospect’s pain. There are often bigger sales to be made through a longer-term consultative approach, rather than simply giving “the answer” upfront.

There’s usually no single ideal solution, especially for the most lucrative B2B sales opportunities. Instead of claiming to always have the answer, the best sales people know how to say “I don’t know…let’s talk further about this.” That’s where you can build deeper sales relationships and uncover bigger sales opportunities.

“I’m not going to sell you what you don’t need.”

The biggest fear of most B2B buyers is that they’ll get sold on some solution/system or service that they don’t really need. Buyers can’t expect to know all the details of what you’re selling – that’s why they’re in the market for the product or service that you sell. The challenge is, some sales people try to upsell a client even when it’s not appropriate. Instead of taking a long-term approach that accounts for the client’s needs, these sales people try to maximize their immediate commission by selling a bigger package of solutions today.

The best sales people are willing to help their customers save money, even if it means making a smaller sale. Great sales people focus on building long-term business relationships, not short-term transactions.

“I’m sorry but I can’t deliver what you need.”

The stereotypical “good sales person” is always agreeable and always wanting to say “yes” to a customer request. Their instincts are good – they want to provide solid customer service – but unfortunately sometimes the best sales people have to say “no.” If a sales person can’t deliver what the customer needs – whether it’s a certain package of solutions, a certain price or a certain delivery date – the sales person needs to notify the customer up front.

Great sales people know that it’s always better to underpromise and overdeliver – so if a sales person knows that their customers aren’t going to be able to get exactly what they’ve asked for, the sales person needs to let them know.

“Please tell me more about your requirements.”

Stereotypical sales people are often reluctant to ask too many questions or drag out the requirements-gathering process. Instead they want to shift focus to closing the deal. This is a mistake.

The best sales people will invest time upfront in asking questions, getting details, and digging into the underlying problems. By learning more about the requirements, the sales person gets better informed about the client’s problem, identify the scope, and recommend better solutions.

The best sales people aren’t afraid to say no, ask questions and give up short-term revenue in exchange for a longer-term relationship. Don’t get dazzled by sales people who seem to have the stereotypical traits of a “good sales person.” Instead, hire (and promote) sales people who surprise you.

Ultimately, the surprising secrets of great sales people are all about building credibility. If a sales person shows humility (by admitting when he/she doesn’t know the answer), builds trust (by not pushing hard for an unnecessary add-on purchase and by not making false promises) and shows sincerity (by asking questions and digging deep to identify the customer’s requirements) then customers are more likely to believe that the sales person is looking out for their best interests.

Credibility and building trust can have a massive impact on closing sales. If customers trust you, they will reward you with long-term business relationships that are far more valuable than a single transaction.

Surprise Photo via Shutterstock

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