It takes a lot of skill and mental resilience to do what salespeople are required to do on a weekly basis. From tracking down qualified prospects, cold calling, and creating a pipeline (at scale, and with a smile on their faces), salespeople often have a lot on their plate.
Effective salespeople must anticipate and handle the challenges they face during the workweek in a way that builds trust between the company and its clients. The struggles they face must be met with confidence and a proactive attitude that contributes to product sales and growth.
Here are just a few of the challenges that effective salespeople anticipate and handle on a weekly basis.
1. Impatient or Busy Prospects
One of the main reasons many people are apprehensive about a career in sales is having to deal with impatient or busy prospects. This type of prospect is especially prominent when your company frequently utilizes cold calling or similar methods to achieve sales targets.
Nobody likes hearing the words I don’t have time for this right now. In fact, many prefer to simply be hung up on instead of coldly rejected before they’ve even had time to say anything of value.
A good salesperson anticipates that all of their potential prospects are busy before they even pick up the phone or hit ‘send’ on an email. Unless you exclusively work in an industry that caters to the elderly or the retired, always assume the person you will be interacting with is on the go or otherwise preoccupied.
At Growth Hackers, we worked with a B2B SaaS client struggling to connect with time-poor prospects. By refining messaging to be more concise and value-driven, we helped them improve engagement and reduce rejection rates.
Have a Great Opening Line
A good introductory line or hook makes your prospect put down what they’re doing and listen to what you have to say. The same line won’t work for everyone, but the point is to adapt and adjust to your target accounts based on what you’re offering and what your target audience wants to hear.
For example, if you’re in the business of selling CRM tools, a zippy introduction such as Let me explain why your current customer relationship management platform could use an upgrade might pique the interest of even the busiest customer experience manager and give you enough time to introduce your product and its advantages.
If you’re mainly communicating with your prospects via phone calls, remember to put in the extra effort to sound cheerful and enthusiastic the moment they answer your call without coming on too strong. Sounding too serious may have the opposite effect of making you seem disinterested or, simply put, too boring to engage with.
2. Questions About Credibility
Why should I trust your company? Why should I rely on your product(s)? These are valid, legitimate questions you might get from prospects even after delivering an excellent sales pitch.
Successful salespeople have answers to these questions at the ready. They can reel off the exact benefits and supporting evidence regarding their company or products in a heartbeat and do so with conviction.
At Growth Hackers, we help sales teams strengthen credibility messaging, and almost all of them improve conversion rates when they proactively address trust concerns with clear proof, results, and positioning.
If you don’t know the advantages of what you’re selling by heart, have it displayed on the screen in front of you during calls.
Be Honest
Openly acknowledging what your company can do better is often the most credible way of gaining your prospects’ trust. This strategy gives you the opportunity to be genuine about the work you do while simultaneously supplying evidence that the company is actively working to provide the best possible products or services.
Often, an honest and human approach to prospecting is the best way to go. Maintaining a knowledge base for your sales team and yourself is essential if you want to be fully prepared for all sorts of questions even uncomfortable ones.
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3. Resistant Prospects
Resistance is an unavoidable part of the sales process you will typically encounter at the prospecting stage. The ability to identify resistance and know how to overcome it is a crucial skill that many great sales leaders take pride in.
Even if the prospect lacks all the information necessary to fully assess the situation, they may still have a good reason to reject your offer. At Growth Hackers, we’ve seen deals stall when teams push too aggressively on resistant prospects. After adopting a more consultative approach, one of our manufacturing clients improved trust, reduced friction, and increased close rates.
Resistant prospects can be difficult to defuse if you attempt to use the same cookie-cutter approach to closing a deal. Instead of coming on too strong and pressuring them into saying yes, start a conversation with them about their needs.
Make Use of Open-Ended Questions
Encourage your prospect to find the answers on their own by posing strategic, open-ended questions that will increase the likelihood they will accept your ideas.
Saying something like I’m not sure I can help you, but could you let me know if there are any aspects of your present circumstances that you’re not satisfied with? can be more than enough to start a dialogue in which you really listen to what the person has to say about their needs and concerns.
This way, instead of seeing you as someone focused solely on the pitch, the prospect will perceive you as someone interested in learning more about them and acting in their best interests.
4. Bad Timing
Let’s say your cold email outreach is a success: you contact an extremely qualified lead, you address their challenges right off the bat, and you have the perfect product or service to offer. However, they are still not ready to seal the deal.
At Growth Hackers, we worked with a Fintech client who was consistently reaching strong leads too early in their buying cycle. By adjusting timing strategies and nurturing follow-ups, we helped them turn missed opportunities into future conversions.
Perhaps they don’t have the budget for it just now, or their current contract is still ongoing with a different provider. Whatever it may be, it feels like it could have been the perfect match had it been the right place and the right time.
Don’t Forget About Qualified Leads
Avoid the urge to abandon prospects who cannot be converted right away. Taking the time to listen and consider how you can assist someone who fits your ICP is never a waste of time.
An effective salesperson sticks around to build a great rapport, keeping the prospect’s contact information on file in order to follow up with them somewhere down the line. You never know when you might be able to include this prospect in your sales funnel, so check in once every 6 months to a year to stay on their radar.
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5. Questions About Discounts
Getting involved in a price war with another company is a losing battle that takes you nowhere. Even so, many salespeople think that haggling over prices and showing that flexibility is a great way to attract new clients. In the end, this becomes a client expectation from which there is no backtracking.
Prospects can be given the price in two ways: by seeing it on the company’s website, or by telling it to them directly on the phone (or whichever mode of communication you use). When the prospect is comparing your pricing to that of competitors, or when their perceived value of the product is low, talking to them gets complicated.
Before we go over our tips for solving this predicament, it is crucial to comprehend your rivals and the overall market price. Think about the following: does your company charge too much for the same value, or is the quality you offer more valuable, hence the reason why the price cannot be lowered?
At Growth Hackers, we’ve seen teams lose margin times and times again by overusing discounts as a shortcut. After shifting to value-based selling, one of our e-commerce clients improved profitability while maintaining strong conversion rates.
Always Highlight Value
If the real value is there, proving it to prospects should not be too difficult. However, you can always increase the perceived value of your offer by including a different kind of special deal instead of promising price concessions in order to reach an understanding with potential customers.
To do this, look for something that your company can deliver with great efficiency. It must be something that the customer will find extremely useful and something your competitors either won’t think to include in the bargain or just can’t.
Often, a winning line that many customers love to hear when asking for a discount might go something like Although I can’t offer you any discounts at this point, I would be glad to throw in an extra something if you choose to make your purchase today such as more product samples, or anything that goes well with your niche.
Remember that you should continuously work on increasing the prospect’s perceived value to reflect the actual value they will receive for that price. The worth will be obvious as long as you are dealing with their actual issue.
Takeaway About What Effective Salespeople Anticipate and Handle on a Regular Basis
The work of personnel in sales can be challenging in many ways. Sometimes the team needs a little extra motivation and encouragement. If you are the team leader within the company, think of using gamification to boost the performance of the sales team. This can be the way to take team-building activities to the next, fun, level.
No matter what industry you work in, there are universal challenges. These struggles might bump your confidence (or that of your sales team), despite having gone through them numerous times before.
However, a well-rounded and effective salesperson will remain positive, calm, and collected in the face of these challenges.
We hope that the situations and tips described in this article will help you take your sales expertise to the next level.
Growth Hackers is a leading international marketing company helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners produce effective salespeople, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
