- March 3, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This weekend, a deer ran across the highway and hit our car. The deer was injured but she did manage to run away so we were relieved that she wasn’t killed. After we returned home, I couldn’t find our dog, Dinger. Regular readers may remember Dinger from these posts:
My Dog Has Better Listening Skills Than Most Salespeople
Top Salespeople are 631% More Effective at This Than Weak Salespeople
How Top Salespeople Manage Resistance
Which Salespeople are Easier to Train – Veteran Salespeople or Millennials?
I found Dinger with his nose glued to my front bumper where some of the deer’s hair was still attached to my car. Dinger, who loves to bark at deer from the safety of our home, seemed to be saying, “Ohhhh, so THIS is what a deer smells like!”
The exact same thing happened to a salesperson I was training. It wasn’t a deer or a dog, it was about Jim’s sales aha moment.
His team was asked to send me an email with their five biggest lessons from their first six months of training. Among Jim’s top five was this one:
Your own bias affects the selling process – Wow! I did not realize that my biases are affecting my sales process and approaches. For example, I have a money bias that was unknown to me until recently. I make a strange face (as if I am going to get punched in the face) whenever I tell the client the cost for a service or product. I started noticing my strange face recently on my zoom calls and I now know that my money bias was likely affecting my sales. I was not confident in my ask for the cost of the service or the product and thus it showed on my face as I waited for the client’s rebuttal. (And usually their rebuttal would feel like they punched me in the face)
What a great lesson! Jim was referring to a sales competency found in his Sales DNA called Comfortable Discussing Money and an attribute called High Money Tolerance found in another competency, Supportive Buy Cycle.
Salespeople who don’t have high money tolerance become very uncomfortable when the amount of money being discussed exceeds the amount they consider to be a lot of money. Jim believed that $500 is a lot of money yet he was asking companies for $500,000. No wonder he made a strange face – that’s 1,000 times greater than his choking point! If the salesperson lacks confidence in how much money they are asking for, why in the world would we expect the prospect to have any confidence about buying from the salesperson?
The top 10% of all salespeople are 4,000% more comfortable discussing money than the weakest 10% – 4,000%! And the top 10% of all salespeople are 100% more likely to have a high money tolerance than the weakest 10%.
Finally, being comfortable discussing money and having a high money tolerance directly support a salesperson’s ability to uncover the actual budget. Salespeople who do uncover the actual budget are 172% more likely to close the business – 172%!
Objective Management Group (OMG) measures 21 Sales Core Competencies and has assessed more than 2.2 million salespeople. You can view some of the data here, see how the data changes by industry, and how you and/or your sales team compares to other companies in your industry and overall.
