The Five Sales Call Myths

Customer calls - whether in-person, on-phone, or online - are the heart and soul of B2B sales. So it's surprising that misconceptions about sales calls abound, even among sales pros who ought to know better. Here are the most common myths and how they torpedo sales success:

MYTH #1. A Sales Call is a Social Call. Some sales pros try to keep conversation at a superficial level as long as possible in the mistaken belief that chatting will build a good relationship with the customer. Wrong. Too much emphasis on the social makes you seem like a pop-in visitor rather than a professional whose time is valuable. That, in turn, makes it all the more more difficult to build trust, credibility and rapport.

MYTH #2. A Sales Call is a Therapy Session. This myth comes out of all the "consultative" sales theory that's batted around. It's one thing to ask questions to try to figure out what the customer might need, but it's a mistake to become so obsessed with questioning that your become passive and unengaged. In this case, the customer is likely to run on and on, providing irrelevant data that results in a content free sales calls where the sales rep never contributes any substance, thus losing credibility.

MYTH #3. A Sales Call is a Third Degree. This is the flip side of Myth #2. Some sales reps become so aggressive in their quest to uncover information about customer needs that they come off like a detective interrogating a suspect. Not surprisingly, the customer quickly feels annoyed and pressured, with a consequent loss of trust and rapport, while credibility goes immediately out the window, never to be recovered.

MYTH #4. A Sales Call is a Lecture. Many sales pros have a canned PowerPoint presentation that they're determined to show the customer, no matter what. The presentation is full of product details, solution detail, case studies, diagrams, and so forth, most of which has only the vaguest relationship to actual customer needs. Canned presentations communicate one message: "All the stuff you told me is interesting, but here's what I want to talk about, regardless of what you think you need."

MYTH #5. A Sales Call is an Arm-twist Session. Sales pros that are overly goal-oriented often push a solution long past the point that a customer feels railroaded. Even "consultative" techniques can seem harsh and awkward in the hands of the goal-obsessed. If the sales pro is focused exclusively on making the sale, the customer will realizes that the point of the questioning is simply to manipulate the customer's answers inexorably towards a close.

Jeffrey Seeley, CEO of the sales training firm Carew International points out that studies show have repeatedly shown that it is eight times easier to earn new business from existing customers than from new prospects. As a result, he claims that sales pros who understand how integrate a sales call into an overall relationship-building process are in high demand, because the end result is that the sales pro's firm becomes the customers' preferred provider. By contrast, sales pros who make the mythic sales call mistakes are dime-a-dozen.