Sales Productivity and Your Very Next Action

Are You Training Prospects To Expect No Value from You?If a sales interaction with a prospect is not going to make a difference, in terms of delivering value that will help them move closer to making a decision, why would you waste their time? Empty sales touches that deliver no value to your prospects are a drain on your sales productivity. And, even worse, they are simply a way of training your prospects to not take you seriously. It will make them leery of investing more of their time in you. Which means they freeze you out and stop answering your calls and emails.Equally as important, why would you waste your own limited selling time on sales activities that don’t move the customer at least one step forward in their buying process? How does that help you achieve your own goals with that prospect? Of course, that could be the problem. Do you have a goal other than getting the order?The Very Next Action Required To Move ForwardProductivity guru David Allen understands how to get things done. His bestselling book, Getting Things Done, is a masterpiece about time management. And, many of the lessons he teaches in his book apply directly to sales as well. One of his most relevant lessons for salespeople involves how to breakdown a bigger task (i.e., getting an order) into the logical sequence of events required to help the customer make a purchase decision (i.e. your sales process.) Allen writes about needing to know at each step of your process the “very next physical action required to move the situation forward.”Let’s look at that statement in the context of sales. In selling terms, this means that you have to know, at each step of your sales process, the very next action you should take to move the customer at least one step closer to making their purchase decision. Before your next sales touch with any prospect in your pipeline, you have to be able to answer this question: what information, context, wisdom or insights is the prospect expecting to receive from me during our next interaction that will move their buying process forward?The Value Of Being DeliberateUnfortunately, this usually is where salespeople trip up. The problem is that salespeople too often don’t know what the “very next action required to move the situation forward” is. Too many salespeople operate on auto-pilot. They just show up for work everyday and unthinkingly try to apply the same sales process to every prospect. And when that doesn’t work, they shrug their shoulders and move on to the next prospect.Oh sure, you’ll say to yourself that you need to send a follow-up email to the customer. However, before you take that step, you have to ask yourself why are you sending that email? What information are you going to provide that will move the customer’s buying process forward? What value are you delivering in the email that will make a difference to the buyer? And, most important of all, what’s the “very next action” that you want the customer to take as a result of receiving the value that you delivered?Being successful in sales requires that a salesperson be curious, thoughtful, mindful and deliberate. Instead of dreaming about getting that order, you should carefully set a series of short-term goals for your prospects that lay out the next actions that you need to take in order to help them take their next steps forward.Here’s the deal: A sales touch will rarely make a difference in the trajectory of the customer’s decision making process if it isn't intentional. Asking and answering the question I posed above will force you to become very deliberate about the sales actions you take. Don’t make a move with a customer until you do. This means that you have an action plan in place for each sales touch to deliver value that will help your prospect make a fast and favorable decision.