Hamish Knox

Videoconferencing has the potential to lead us into a serious, rapport-killing selling mistake that a whole lot of us are, unfortunately, already strongly predisposed to make.

Sales managers are in a lonely position between the expectations of senior executives and the expectations of their salespeople. 

Below are six common ways sales managers steal from their salespeople to get their emotional needs met and relieve some of that loneliness.

It's easy to slip into "defense" mode when a buyer appears to criticize our company or our product; however, the moment we start defending anything to a buyer we're losing control of the sale.

When we feel another person in our life – prospect, client, vendor, team member, spouse, child, etc.- is offside we have a tendency to avoid addressing their behavior in the moment, which often erupts later, or we hammer them with a message to correct the behavior we believe is offside.

There's a trick of our brain that is wired into all of us called "anchoring," which can unintentionally help us cut our price before our buyer asks for a discount.

When we feel another person in our life – prospect, client, vendor, team member, spouse, child, etc.- is offside we have a tendency to avoid addressing their behavior in the moment, which often erupts later, or we hammer them with a message to correct the behavior we believe is offside.

Here's an incomplete list of excuses salespeople make when a deal goes sideways because of "new" information from a prospect.

Just as it doesn’t matter what we say, it matters what our prospect hears, how we listen to our prospect while determine whether we succeed in getting paid on the information we gather instead of going into knowing mode and presuming a sale when none may exist.

George Carlin did a bit once about words that included the phrase, “it’s the context that makes them good or bad.” The bit *hasn’t* aged well, but his words are prescient when it comes to techniques learned in training.

Humans are either open or close minded to any suggestion. Once the mind is closed its nigh impossible to open it back up again until that person wants to re-open their mind.