While the handling of sales opportunities is a technical subject that we’ve been exploring in some detail, there is an underlying factor that affects any salesperson’s opportunity management. It is also the underlying element to sales techniques.
That is, the way an opportunity is viewed.
A Matter of Viewpoint
Often the way that a salesperson succeeds has much to do with the way they look at opportunities and losses—not necessarily the “luck” they possess or the opportunities that seem to come their way by chance.
Generally if you were to examine people who seem to be succeeding no matter their chosen field, you’d see how this works. Instead of abandoning hope when they lose a perceived opportunity, they keep their ideal opportunities in mind and keep seeking them out is one of the key sales techniques. As if by magic, they start showing up. Whereas the person with the totally negative outlook will fail even to see them at all, leading that person to believe that the opportunities simply aren’t there.
Salespeople
Interestingly successful salespeople usually fall into that first category—the ones who continually watch for opportunities and find them. It’s not that they encounter any fewer losses than anyone else necessarily; it’s that they don’t focus on the losses and lost leads or opportunities. Instead they are recalling how they’ve done it right in the past, looking for elements of opportunities and sales techniques that succeeded in what they’re encountering now, and seizing on what they know could work.
A salesperson will nearly always have more losses than wins—but it is the wins that keep them moving forward, and the losses that stop the ones who focus solely on the losses.
Don’t Give Up
Part of the trick of success is, of course, persistence. You might recall someone you yourself knew that when they started off were absolutely hopeless as a salesperson. But they stuck with it: they got coached, they apprenticed under experts, they utilized all successful sales techniques they could pick up, they adjusted themselves when they found they were doing the wrong thing—and eventually they won. It’s an absolute truth (even if an overly used cliché) that the surest way to fail at anything is to give up.
Finding Opportunities
Those that succeed also are greatly assisted in locating opportunities when they have the right tools to do so. A leading-edge CRM solution rates leads and opportunities so that the elements they are watching for are extremely evident right in CRM. The right view combined with the right technology makes for a very winning combination.
Underlying all sales techniques is the method with which opportunity is viewed. What is yours?
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