Author: MFG Empire

Open post sales coaching session for medical device sales team Pennsylvania

How to Build Trust With B2B Buyers: What the 32% Trust Statistic Tells Every Sales Leader

Scorecard Sales: Building Sales Teams That Actually Win

The number should terrify every sales leader in South-Central Pennsylvania: roughly one in three B2B buyers considers the salesperson sitting across the table from them a valuable resource in making a purchasing decision. That means two out of every three buyers view your sales representatives as, at best, a necessary inconvenience and, at worst, an obstacle standing between them and the information they actually need. The trust deficit in professional selling has reached a level that fundamentally threatens how companies in construction, insurance, and manufacturing acquire and retain customers across York, Lancaster, Dauphin, Cumberland, and Adams counties.

This crisis did not emerge overnight. It represents the accumulated consequence of decades of sales practices that prioritized closing over serving, scripts over conversation, and short-term transactions over long-term relationships. Buyers have learned from experience that salespeople frequently exaggerate capabilities, obscure limitations, disappear after the contract is signed, and treat every interaction as a closing opportunity rather than a genuine exchange of value. The rational response to this pattern is exactly what buyers have done: minimize their exposure to salespeople, conduct independent research, and rely on peers, online content, and third-party reviews rather than vendor-supplied information.

The consequences cascade through every metric that matters to a sales organization. When buyers do not trust salespeople, they withhold critical information about their actual needs, budgets, and decision timelines. They share sanitized versions of their challenges that prevent salespeople from offering genuinely relevant solutions. They invite multiple vendors to compete on price rather than engaging deeply with any single provider on value. And they delay decisions interminably because they lack the confidence that any vendor is telling them the complete truth-a psychological dynamic explored in Loss Aversion Is Killing Your Deals: The Psychology Behind Why B2B Buyers Choose “No Decision” Over Any Decision, which documents how fear and uncertainty. After all, buyers may abandon promising purchases entirely.

Why Traditional Sales Training Created This Problem

The irony of the B2B trust crisis is that it was largely manufactured by the sales training industry itself. For decades, the dominant training paradigm taught salespeople techniques designed to control conversations, overcome resistance, and manipulate buyers toward predetermined outcomes. Objection handling frameworks trained salespeople to view buyer concerns as obstacles to neutralize rather than legitimate information to incorporate. Closing techniques taught salespeople to create artificial urgency, apply social pressure, and use psychological tricks that treated the buyer as an adversary to defeat rather than a partner to serve.

These approaches worked for a time, primarily because buyers had limited alternatives for gathering information. When the salesperson was the only accessible source of product knowledge, competitive comparison, and implementation guidance, buyers tolerated aggressive tactics because the information itself was valuable enough to justify the discomfort. The internet destroyed that dynamic permanently. Buyers now arrive at sales conversations with extensive independent research already completed. They have read reviews, consulted peers, downloaded technical specifications, and formed preliminary shortlists-all without speaking to a single sales representative. The salesperson who shows up armed with a polished pitch and a twelve-step closing process is offering something the buyer no longer needs while failing to provide what the buyer actually wants: genuine expertise, honest guidance, and trustworthy counsel.

The SBA Learning Platform offers business development resources that emphasize sustainable growth through customer relationships rather than transactional selling techniques, reflecting a broader institutional recognition that the old models of sales training have failed small and mid-sized businesses. The Small Business Administration’s emphasis on coaching, mentoring, and relationship-based business development through programs like SCORE represents an acknowledgment that the most successful small businesses grow through trust rather than through sales pressure.

South-Central Pennsylvania’s business landscape makes this shift particularly urgent. The region’s economy runs on relationship-dense industries where reputation compounds over years and a single broken trust can cascade through interconnected professional networks. When a York County contractor’s salesperson oversells a capability on a commercial project, the resulting failure does not just damage one relationship. It damages relationships with the general contractor, the architect, the project owner, and every subcontractor who witnesses the fallout. In markets this interconnected, trust is not a soft skill. It is the foundational infrastructure upon which all revenue is built.

The Buyer’s New Decision Architecture

Understanding why trust has become the central variable in B2B sales requires understanding how dramatically the buyer’s decision-making process has changed. Modern B2B buyers spend roughly three-quarters of their purchasing journey researching anonymously before ever contacting a vendor. They consume up to fifteen pieces of content before making a purchase decision, much of that content existing entirely outside the selling organization’s control. They seek validation through multiple channels-industry forums, LinkedIn discussions, peer recommendations, third-party review platforms-and they trust these sources far more than anything a salesperson says.

This new architecture means that by the time a buyer agrees to a sales meeting, they have already formed substantial emotional impressions about the vendor. Those impressions were shaped by content quality, online presence, response times, social proof, and the experiences other buyers shared publicly. The salesperson inherits these pre-existing impressions, and either confirms or contradicts them through the quality of their interaction. A buyer who arrives expecting a consultative conversation and encounters a scripted pitch experiences a trust violation that is nearly impossible to recover from. A buyer who arrives skeptical and encounters genuine curiosity and honest expertise experiences a trust surprise that can shift the entire relationship trajectory.

The neuroscience behind this process is well-established. As documented in The Neuroscience of Selling: Why 95% of B2B Purchase Decisions Happen Before Your Rep Opens Their Mouth, the subconscious mind processes emotional signals from every interaction and aggregates them into an overall trust assessment that operates below conscious awareness. The buyer cannot articulate exactly why they trust one salesperson and distrust another. They experience the assessment as a gut feeling, an intuition, a sense that one vendor “gets it” while another does not. But that intuition is not random. It is the product of thousands of micro-signals processed by the brain’s social evaluation circuits, and it can be systematically influenced by salespeople who understand how those circuits work.

Seventy-three percent of B2B buying decisions are now made by millennials, with forty-four percent serving as the final decision-maker. This generational shift intensifies the trust challenge because millennial buyers grew up in an information-rich environment where manipulative sales tactics are easily identified and immediately penalized. They have less tolerance for scripted conversations, less patience with salespeople who do not understand their specific industry context, and higher expectations for transparency and authenticity than previous generations. They expect salespeople to earn the conversation through demonstrated expertise, not to demand it through persistent outreach.

What Trust Actually Looks Like in Practice

Rebuilding buyer trust is not accomplished through slogans, values statements, or promises to be different. Trust is built through specific, observable behaviors repeated consistently over time. Research on B2B trust identifies three primary components that buyers evaluate, mostly unconsciously, during every interaction with a sales professional.

Competence accounts for the largest share of trust formation-approximately thirty percent of a buyer’s trust assessment in North American B2B contexts. Buyers evaluate whether the salesperson genuinely understands their industry, their specific operational challenges, and the practical implications of the solution being discussed. This assessment happens rapidly and ruthlessly. A salesperson who mispronounces an industry term, who asks a question that reveals unfamiliarity with standard processes, or who proposes a solution without understanding the buyer’s constraints loses competence credibility in seconds. Rebuilding it takes exponentially longer than losing it.

Dependability contributes roughly nineteen percent of the trust equation. This dimension evaluates whether the salesperson and their organization do what they say they will do, when they say they will do it. It encompasses everything from returning calls promptly to delivering proposals on time to following through on commitments made during conversations. Dependability seems like a low bar, yet the reason it carries significant weight in trust assessments is that so many sales organizations fail it consistently. A salesperson who promises a customized proposal by Friday and delivers a generic template on Tuesday of the following week has just confirmed every negative expectation the buyer brought to the relationship.

Consistency rounds out the top trust drivers at approximately seventeen percent. Buyers evaluate whether their experience with a salesperson and organization remains stable across interactions, contacts, and channels. A company that presents one personality on its website, a different personality through its marketing, and yet another personality through its salespeople creates cognitive dissonance that the subconscious brain interprets as a threat signal. Consistency builds the neural pattern recognition that eventually produces the feeling of “knowing what to expect”-the emotional foundation of trust.

Building Trust-Based Sales Capabilities in South-Central PA Industries

Construction, insurance, and manufacturing companies across South-Central Pennsylvania face a specific version of the trust challenge that national-level research does not fully capture. These are industries where selling happens through long-cycle relationships in tight-knit professional communities. The contractor who installs HVAC systems in York County commercial projects is not selling to anonymous buyers in a vast market. That contractor is selling to the same network of general contractors, property managers, and building owners year after year. Every interaction builds or erodes trust that compounds across the entire relationship portfolio.

The SCORE mentoring network-a resource partner of the U.S. Small Business Administration providing free business mentoring through over eleven thousand volunteer counselors nationwide-emphasizes that the most effective small business sales approaches center on genuine relationship building rather than transactional closing techniques. SCORE’s guidance reflects what regional business owners already know intuitively: in markets where your reputation precedes every sales call, the quality of your relationships determines the ceiling of your revenue.

For construction companies, trust-based selling means demonstrating deep knowledge of project delivery methods, understanding how general contractors evaluate subcontractor reliability, and communicating honestly about capabilities and limitations rather than overpromising to win bids. A mechanical subcontractor whose salesperson can articulate exactly how their installation process minimizes interference with other trades builds more trust in a single conversation than a competitor who simply promises to meet specifications.

For insurance agencies, trust-based selling means helping clients understand risk rather than simply quoting premiums. An insurance professional who walks a manufacturing plant manager through the specific liability exposures their operation faces-explaining not just coverage options but the operational changes that reduce risk-positions themselves as an advisor rather than a vendor. That positioning creates trust that competitors quoting lower premiums cannot easily displace because the buyer’s trust assessment encompasses far more than price.

For manufacturing companies selling to other businesses, trust-based selling means understanding the buyer’s production processes, quality requirements, and supply chain constraints well enough to propose solutions that address operational realities rather than generic value propositions. A raw material supplier whose salesperson understands their customer’s specific machining tolerances and can explain how material properties affect finished part quality builds competence trust that creates genuine competitive advantage.

The Compounding Returns of Trust Investment

Trust is not a binary variable that a company either possesses or lacks. Trust compounds over time as consistent behavior builds progressively stronger neural associations in the buyer’s brain. Each positive interaction reinforces the pattern recognition circuits that produce the feeling of confidence, while each negative interaction requires multiple positive interactions to offset because the brain weights negative experiences more heavily than positive ones.

This compounding dynamic means that companies investing in trust-based sales approaches today build advantages that accelerate over time. The construction salesperson who builds deep trust with a general contractor over three years of reliable performance earns something no competitor can purchase: the presumption of competence on future projects. That presumption means the trusted supplier gets first call on new opportunities, receives more complete information about project requirements, and faces less resistance when proposing changes or upgrades. The economic value of that trust position vastly exceeds any investment in training required to build it.

The opposite dynamic is equally powerful and equally compounding. Companies that tolerate inconsistent sales behavior, that allow salespeople to overpromise and underdeliver, or that prioritize short-term closes over long-term relationships accumulate trust damage that becomes progressively harder to reverse. In South-Central Pennsylvania’s interconnected business communities, negative trust signals travel fast and far through professional networks, chambers of commerce, and industry associations. A single trust violation can close doors across an entire market segment for years.

This is why the thirty-two percent trust statistic should be understood not as an abstract industry problem but as a concrete competitive opportunity. In a market where two-thirds of buyers distrust salespeople, the company that systematically builds genuine trust through competence, dependability, and consistency occupies a position of extraordinary advantage. That company is not competing against other vendors. It is competing against the buyer’s accumulated negative experience with every other salesperson they have encountered. And when your team represents the exception to that pattern, the buyer notices-not consciously, but in the subconscious trust circuits that actually drive purchasing decisions.

Scorecard Sales: Training That Rebuilds What Sales Broke

Scorecard Sales builds customized training programs for construction, insurance, and manufacturing companies throughout South-Central Pennsylvania. We do not teach manipulation. We teach your team to earn buyer trust through competence, genuine expertise, and consistent follow-through-the only sustainable path to sales growth in markets where reputation is everything.

Our Services Include:

  • B2B Sales Training Courses – Industry-specific programs for construction, insurance, and manufacturing teams built around trust-based selling approaches that buyers actually respond to
  • Sales Coaching and Strategy – Ongoing development that builds consultative selling habits and accountability systems, ensuring your team delivers consistent trust-building experiences

Ready to Become the Exception Your Buyers Are Looking For? Request a free consultation to discuss how trust-based sales training can differentiate your team in South-Central Pennsylvania’s competitive markets.

Works Cited

“SBA Learning Platform.” U.S. Small Business Administration, www.sba.gov/sba-learning-platform. Accessed 24 Feb. 2026.

“11 Sales Techniques to Help Grow Your Small Business.” SCORE, www.score.org/resource/blog-post/11-sales-techniques-help-grow-your-small-business. Accessed 24 Feb. 2026.

Related Articles

 

Open post South Central Pennsylvania life sciences sales training map York Lancaster Harrisburg

Loss Aversion in B2B Sales: Why Buyers Choose No Decision – and How to Break Through

Scorecard Sales: Building Sales Teams That Actually Win

Your best proposal this quarter was not beaten by a competitor. It was beaten by nothing. The prospect who told you they loved the presentation, who asked all the right questions, who seemed genuinely excited about working together-that prospect went silent. Three follow-up emails. Two voicemails. A LinkedIn message. Then the final call where someone in procurement said they had decided to “hold off for now” or “revisit next quarter.” The deal did not go to another vendor. It simply died.

If this pattern sounds painfully familiar, you are not alone, and you are not doing anything uniquely wrong. Industry research indicates that eighty-six percent of B2B purchases stall at some point during the buying process, and eighty-one percent of buyers ultimately express dissatisfaction with the provider they do choose. These are staggering numbers that reveal a fundamental dysfunction in how B2B selling and buying interact. The problem is not that buyers are irrational. The problem is that they are operating under a specific and well-documented psychological bias that most sales teams have never been trained to recognize, let alone overcome.

That bias is loss aversion-the deeply wired human tendency to feel the pain of losing something approximately twice as intensely as the pleasure of gaining something of equal value. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s research established this principle as one of the most robust findings in behavioral economics, and its implications for B2B sales are profound. Your buyer is not weighing the potential benefits of your solution against its cost. Your buyer’s subconscious brain is weighing the catastrophic emotional consequences of making a wrong decision against the comparatively mild discomfort of maintaining an imperfect status quo. And in that calculation, doing nothing almost always wins.

The Neuroscience of Why “No Decision” Feels Safe

Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education has published extensive research on how the subconscious mind drives purchasing behavior, documenting how biological responses-not conscious analysis-form the foundation of consumer and business buying decisions. Neuromarketing research demonstrates that businesses can predict behavior by understanding what people react to on a biological level rather than relying on what they say in focus groups or sales conversations. The finding is consistent across consumer and B2B contexts: people cannot accurately report their own decision-making processes because the critical processing happens below conscious awareness.

Loss aversion operates through the amygdala, the brain’s threat detection center. When a B2B buyer contemplates a significant purchase decision, the amygdala does not evaluate the probability-weighted expected value of the investment. It generates an emotional threat response proportional to the worst plausible outcome. For a construction company owner evaluating a new equipment supplier, the amygdala is not processing potential efficiency gains. It is simulating the scenario where the equipment fails on a critical job site, causing delays that trigger liquidated damages, damaging a client relationship that took five years to build, and requiring an embarrassing explanation to partners about why the switch was made.

This threat response is neurologically powerful because it evolved to keep humans alive. The asymmetry between gains and losses had enormous survival value in ancestral environments where a single catastrophic mistake-approaching the wrong animal, eating the wrong food, trusting the wrong person-could be fatal. The brain that overweighted potential losses relative to potential gains survived to reproduce. The brain that evaluated risk and reward symmetrically did not. Your buyer inherited that neurological architecture, and it activates every single time they consider signing a purchase order for a significant B2B transaction.

The critical insight for sales professionals is that loss aversion does not require the buyer to consciously evaluate risk. The emotional response occurs automatically, instantly, and below the threshold of conscious awareness. By the time your buyer sits down to “rationally” compare your proposal against the alternative of doing nothing, the subconscious brain has already cast its vote-overwhelmingly-for the status quo. The conscious mind then dutifully manufactures rational justifications: the budget is tight, the timing is not ideal, they need to get more internal alignment, they want to see another quarter of data. These explanations feel genuine to the buyer because they are unaware of the subconscious process that actually drove the hesitation.

The Status Quo Bias Multiplier

Loss aversion does not operate in isolation. It intersects with a related cognitive bias called status quo bias-the powerful preference for the current state of affairs regardless of whether superior alternatives exist. Status quo bias means that your buyer’s default setting is to keep doing exactly what they are doing right now. Your proposal must generate enough emotional and rational momentum to overcome that default, and the threshold is dramatically higher than most salespeople realize.

Status quo bias is particularly devastating in B2B sales involving construction, insurance, and manufacturing because these industries operate on established relationships and proven processes. A manufacturing plant manager using the same lubrication supplier for twelve years is not consciously evaluating that supplier’s performance against market alternatives each quarter. The existing relationship has become psychologically invisible-it is simply part of how things work. Introducing a new option forces the buyer to consciously evaluate a decision that has been operating on autopilot, and that conscious evaluation activates loss aversion by making the buyer aware of everything they could lose by switching.

The combination of loss aversion and status quo bias creates what behavioral economists call the “endowment effect”-the tendency to overvalue things we already possess simply because we possess them. Your buyer does not just prefer their current supplier. They unconsciously overvalue their current supplier’s capabilities while unconsciously discounting yours. This is not conscious bias or corruption. It is a fundamental feature of human cognition that operates identically in every buyer, every industry, and every transaction size.

Understanding why this psychological dynamic creates so many stalled deals-and how it connects to the broader neuroscience of B2B decision-making-is examined in The Neuroscience of Selling: Why 95% of B2B Purchase Decisions Happen Before Your Rep Opens Their Mouth, which documents how the subconscious mind dominates purchasing behavior far more than the rational spreadsheet analysis most sales teams prepare for.

What This Means for Your Sales Pipeline Right Now

The practical consequences of loss aversion for B2B sales teams are measurable and immediate. Every deal in your pipeline that has stalled-every proposal that received positive verbal feedback but no signed contract-is almost certainly being held hostage by loss aversion rather than by any legitimate business objection. The buyer liked your presentation because your solution genuinely is superior to their current situation. They stalled because the subconscious cost of change exceeded the conscious benefit of improvement.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that wholesale and manufacturing sales representatives face particular pressure because their income and job security depend directly on the volume of merchandise they sell. With approximately 142,100 openings projected annually in these roles through 2034-primarily from turnover as representatives transfer out of or retire from the profession-the industry faces constant talent cycling that compounds the loss aversion problem. New salespeople who have not been trained to recognize and address buyer psychology repeat the same patterns: strong presentations followed by mysterious deal stalls, followed by frustration, followed by departure from the profession.

The financial damage accumulates invisibly because companies rarely track “no decision” outcomes with the same rigor they apply to competitive losses. When a deal goes to a named competitor, the loss is visible and analyzed. When a deal simply evaporates into indefinite postponement, it often slides off the pipeline report without generating any organizational learning. Yet research consistently shows that “no decision” outcomes represent the single largest category of B2B deal failure-larger than losses to any individual competitor. Your sales team may be losing more revenue to buyer psychology than to every competitor in your market combined.

Breaking Through Loss Aversion Without Manipulation

The solution to loss aversion is not manipulation, pressure tactics, or artificial urgency. These approaches backfire catastrophically because they amplify the very threat response that loss aversion produces. A buyer who feels pressured becomes more fearful, not less. The amygdala interprets sales pressure as confirmation that the situation is dangerous, reinforcing the impulse to retreat to the safety of the status quo. Every high-pressure closing technique ever invented works against the grain of loss aversion neuroscience, which is why these techniques produce short-term compliance occasionally but destroy long-term trust consistently.

Effective approaches to loss aversion work with the brain’s architecture rather than against it. The first principle is reframing the status quo as the risky choice. Loss aversion makes buyers fear change, but the same bias can be redirected by helping buyers recognize what they are losing by not changing. A salesperson who helps a manufacturing plant manager calculate the annual cost of equipment downtime, material waste, and production inefficiency under the current approach is not creating artificial urgency. That salesperson is making the losses associated with inaction visible, concrete, and emotionally real. The buyer’s loss aversion then works in your favor because maintaining the status quo now feels like the dangerous choice.

The second principle is reducing the perceived magnitude of change. Large, transformative proposals trigger maximum loss aversion because they represent maximum deviation from the status quo. Phased implementations, pilot programs, and structured transitions feel dramatically less threatening to the subconscious brain because they preserve most of the current state while introducing change incrementally. A salesperson offering a sixty-day trial installation is asking the buyer to risk almost nothing. A salesperson proposing a complete system overhaul is asking the buyer to risk everything. The underlying solution may be identical, but the psychological framing produces radically different emotional responses.

The third principle is transferring risk explicitly. Guarantees, performance warranties, and contractual protections do not just protect the buyer commercially. They provide the emotional brain with evidence that the worst-case scenario-the outcome the amygdala is simulating-has been contained. When a salesperson says “if this does not deliver the results we have projected, here is exactly what happens,” the amygdala receives a signal that the threat has been bounded. The emotional resistance to change decreases proportionally to how specifically and credibly the risk has been transferred.

The fourth principle is leveraging social proof to neutralize uncertainty. The subconscious brain interprets evidence that other similar organizations have made the same decision successfully as a powerful safety signal. Case studies, reference calls, and site visits are not just selling tools. They are neurological interventions that reduce amygdala activation by demonstrating that the feared outcome did not materialize for others in comparable situations. The buyer’s brain essentially updates its threat assessment based on observed outcomes, lowering the emotional barrier to action. This social proof dynamic and how it intersects with the broader collapse of trust in sales relationships is examined in Only 32% of B2B Buyers Trust Salespeople-Here’s How South-Central PA Companies Are Beating Those Odds.

Why Generic Training Cannot Solve This Problem

The reason most sales training fails to address loss aversion is that most sales training was not designed with buyer psychology in mind. Traditional programs teach salespeople how to present features, handle objections, and execute closing techniques-all activities that address the five percent of conscious rational processing rather than the ninety-five percent of subconscious emotional processing that actually drives decisions. A salesperson who has memorized twelve closing techniques but does not understand loss aversion is equipped to win arguments but not to win deals.

Industry-specific training matters enormously because loss aversion manifests differently in different contexts. The specific fears that construction buyers carry differ from those of insurance buyers or manufacturing buyers. The risk profiles, decision timelines, stakeholder dynamics, and relationship structures vary dramatically across industries, and effective loss aversion strategies must be calibrated to these specific environments. A reframing technique that works brilliantly in a construction equipment sale may fall flat in an insurance brokerage context because the underlying fear structures differ.

This is why companies investing in psychology-informed, industry-specific sales training consistently outperform those sending their teams through generic programs. The return on investment comes not from teaching salespeople to be more persuasive in traditional terms but from teaching them to recognize and address the specific psychological barriers that prevent otherwise willing buyers from saying yes. When your team understands that the deal is not stalling because of budget constraints or competitive pressure but because the buyer’s amygdala has flagged the decision as threatening, entirely different-and far more effective-response strategies become available.

Scorecard Sales: Training That Breaks Through Buyer Resistance

Scorecard Sales builds customized training programs for construction, insurance, and manufacturing companies throughout South-Central Pennsylvania. We teach your team to recognize the real reasons deals stall and equip them with psychology-driven approaches that move buyers past fear toward confident decisions-without pressure tactics that destroy trust.

Our Services Include:

  • B2B Sales Training Courses – Industry-specific programs that address the actual psychology behind why buyers hesitate, stall, and choose “no decision”
  • Sales Coaching and Strategy – Ongoing development that helps your team identify loss aversion in real-time and respond with techniques that work with buyer psychology

Ready to Stop Losing Deals to “No Decision”? Request a free consultation to learn how understanding buyer psychology can transform your close rates.

Works Cited

“Neuromarketing – Predicting Consumer Behavior to Drive Purchasing Decisions.” Professional and Executive Development, Harvard Division of Continuing Education, professional.dce.harvard.edu/blog/marketing/neuromarketing-predicting-consumer-behavior-to-drive-purchasing-decisions/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2026.

“Wholesale and Manufacturing Sales Representatives.” Occupational Outlook Handbook, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/wholesale-and-manufacturing-sales-representatives.htm. Accessed 24 Feb. 2026.

Related Articles

 

How to Course Correct in Sales

Uncategorized

Sales is never really on a constant trajectory. It is high highs and low lows. There is no getting around that for any salesperson no matter how great you are. One minute you are on top of the mountain and the next thing you know you find yourself stuck down in the valley and you should find yourself asking, “How do I get back to the top of the mountain?” Experienced sales people have their own methods to deal with this based on experience. Most will re-engage their existing clients to help them fall in love with their job again. Others know that the valley is only temporary and good old persistence will find them back on the pinnacle in no time. What about your less experienced sales people who may be a little more scared or confused?  The first two things we want to know are: 1) what got you on the top of the mountain in the first place and 2) what started your descent back into the valley? Was there a drastic shift in the market? Is this the general season or cycle nature of the sales process? Was there a change in the salesperson’s behavior that made them go rogue and get out of process? Some valleys last only a few days and possibly a couple of weeks until we recover. But what happens if this goes into a month and beyond. At what point should there be an intervention and what does an intervention look like?  Sometimes you need to let a trip into the valley run its course. It is a natural part of the process. It causes us to reflect on what is working and not working. It reminds us that we cannot rest on laurels for very long. Although it can and will cause some anxieties, it is also a good cleansing of the ego which all salespeople need to perform willingly or otherwise. In other words, one bad week is no reason to hit the panic button; especially for a long term high performing sales person. However, most salespeople are too proud to reach out and ask for help and the longer they have been in sales, the less likely they are to send out a flag.  How do we know there is a rut in the first place? Conventional wisdom tells us to look at the numbers and that would certainly be true. My mood is often dictated by sales. When someone observes me as being grouchy, sales is always the best place to start. This is also true with other sales people as we tend to wear our emotions on our sleeves. These are, however, only lagging indicators. The best places to start looking are activity and pipeline. This is usually where you will find the source of a salesperson’s frustrations as well as course corrections. No salesperson likes to be called out on their decrease in sales activities, but it must be done for everyone’s sake. If you are having monthly one on one sales reviews with your salespeople, it is easier to catch these process deficiencies. Be careful not to be too critical or accusatory when review pipeline and sales activity. Sales people are very high strung and can easily become defensive. It’s best to put things into terms of agreed upon goals and processes. For example, “Alex, we agreed on this goal and the plan to get there. Do you feel at this point that the goal is unreasonable or the plan is unworkable? If so, why do you feel that way? What are your thoughts for getting back on track?” This can be an uncomfortable conversation at first, but if handled properly from the start most salespeople will be relieved to have someone to talk to. Sales can be a very lonely position and when things get tough, it becomes even lonelier. Having someone to talk through their issues with can be very beneficial and many times that is all it takes to get sales back on track. Salespeople always want to be successful and since there performance is always exposed, the more you can help them the better. Just remember, when you see someone drowning, you don’t yell out to them, “Hey dummy! What were you thinking when you swam out that far? What were you thinking?! I told you not to do that!!”. Instead, you throw them a life preserver, pull them back to land and help them catch their breath. If you throw them a life preserver, chances are they will be a better swimmer next time which is better than watching them sink.  Perhaps you could use a life preserver yourself? After all, if the captain is drowning, he cannot effectively save the crew. This is where Scorecard Sales Training and Coaching can help. Course correction in sales starts with studying the sales map, At Scorecard Sales, we call this map our Sales Culture Assessment. With this free tool, we can help you to chart a course for success for your crew of sales people and your company. Chat with us here to get started with your free assessment.

Sales: How Are You Keeping Score?

Uncategorized

How do you keep score when it comes to sales? Revenue, correct? That was easy. Article complete and on with the day for everyone. I get it. After all, results are what matter when it comes to sales. Either you are hitting your numbers and you can keep your job, or you are not hitting your numbers and you must look for employment elsewhere. That’s pretty much how we live out our lives in sales. We are judged by one single number no matter how hard we try. For many people in sales, they walk from one 12-month failure to the next until they decide that sales just isn’t for them and the only other thing that they learned is to resent everything about sales. Why are we okay with this? Is there more to scoring a salesperson than revenue alone? Yes, there is. Numbers matter in every aspect of life. It is how we understand our world. It is how we learn. There are a lot more numbers to capture and study when it comes to sales. But why are other numbers important? Because the revenue tells you the ‘what’, but it never explains the ‘why’. Why is one person more successful than another? What are best practices? How can you predict success in sales? How can you recreate success and avoid the turnstile of failures through your sales organization? We have to look beyond just scoring revenue and go for the whole story.What else can be measured? Just about anything if you are willing to take the time. How many phone calls were made? How many meetings were attended? How many outbound emails were sent? How many proposals were drafted? You get the picture. Any step in the sales process is important and both can, and should be, measured. This is not a new idea either. Many sales organizations have these kinds of systems. Thou shall make 30 phone calls a day. You are expected to cold visit 10 offices a week. And so forth. Sounds fun? Nope, but that is because it’s only part of the score story. What’s missing is the concept of a balanced scorecard. The balanced scorecard concept has been around for a long time in the corporate world. It tells us that there is more than one important thing to focus on to be successful and if we want to be a highly functioning person or company, we must maintain a blend of activities and achievements. The same is quite true in sales. In B2B sales we need a balanced set of activities in the sales process to convert our pipelines into closed deals and not all sales activities are weighted equal. An email is certainly not more important than a face to face meeting with a prospect, but the email is important nonetheless. Why is tracking different sales activity so important? Even if tracking is vital, it sounds more boring and laborious than the CRM that no one is using anyway. Tracking your sales score is easy with The Scorecard Planning Tool.  Sales is never a constant for anyone. Salespeople, clients and markets all run in cycles. Having a scorecard helps you to capture and understand the cycle so that you can make corrections and predictions. Therein lies the key to the kingdom. Make sales as predictable as possible and seek out process improvement for underperforming salespeople so that you can coach them back to success. We know that what gets measured gets attention and ultimately fixed. If you have been keeping score of all of your, or your team sales activity, what kind of story do you think the numbers would tell you? Would you learn the secret to your top performer’s success? Would it affirm that one of your lower performers is not pursuing enough meetings? Would it debunk your theory that it’s not that your team is not making enough phone calls, but they lack the deal closing skills to capture the most of their opportunities? Without numbers from a balanced scorecard, we would never really know. A balanced scorecard will help you to gain better efficiencies and benchmarks while making everybody’s lives easier; especially yours. Without it, you are managing and coaching sales in the dark. Dig deeper. Understand the sales process. Help your sales team instead watching them spiral in a continued tailspin. Let your team tell their activity stories with numbers that mean something instead of the hopes and promises of the dream clients that aren’t coming. A balanced sales scorecard is your tool for making sales sophisticated even for a novice. The data is there. It has always been there. You just need to capture it and put it to good use. Get the competitive advantage by learning the true functions of your sales process so you can make changes for the better. So, what is your score when it comes to sales? Find out the real story with a balanced scorecard.

What’s Your Sales Plan?

Uncategorized

There are enough isms on the topic of planning that you would think that most of the world would have gotten the hang of it by now. Fail to plan, plan to fail seems to be the most popular and appropriate saying for any given situation. There are as many reasons why this is important as there are reasons why people don’t do it. This is especially true in sales. You can’t even get everyone to agree on what a good sales plan looks like. It is no wonder why this task gets brushed aside, scoffed at or falls victim to procrastination. The task of planning in and of itself seems daunting enough. No thanks; let’s just wing it this year. Why is planning so difficult? Is it because we lack a basic template to help guide us through the process? Do we find it to be a waste of time because we know we’re going to go off course sooner than later? Or perhaps it is because of a lack of practice in the discipline of sales planning. Whatever the case, when we don’t plan we leave our fate in the hands of destiny when it should be the other way around. With proper planning and execution, fate should be obeying our commands, or at least behave more like a tamed animal than a wild beast. But enough of this theory stuff, let’s get down to the business of a salesperson business plan. A salesperson, more than any other person in production, needs a sales plan as his position is more strategic than other parts of production. It involves a lot more unknown variables than any other position. In fact, the sales team tends to be the first leading indicator when there is a change in the market and having a sales plan to base it on is one of the best ways to gauge unanticipated change. Even if your salespeople don’t have their own business plan, they aren’t doomed to fail, but they are greatly hindered in terms of success. There is nothing worse than thinking on your feet everyday as a salesperson, so why make it so hard on ourselves. A good business plan for salespeople should not be complicated. It would have what any normal plan of this nature would have. What are your goals? How successfully have you attained goals in the past? What are your opportunities, targets and obstacles? What has been working? What has not been working? That’s the easy part. The hard part is assembling this process in a concise, repeatable and logical template so that the salesperson can focus more on the plan than formatting. In fact, with the proper process and template, annual sales planning could take less than an hour for a moderately seasoned salesperson. What do you do with your plan after you have created it is another story. A good plan should fit on one sheet of paper. Why? Because no one goes back and revisits their planning manifesto in its entirety. No one. A good sales plan should read like any one page executive summary. Digestible, direct and simple. Since this plan should be reviewed no less than on a monthly basis, you should be kind to your future self and be respectful of your own time. A simple check in to see if you are still on track. Are you doing what you said you were going to do? Why or why not?  One important role of the salesperson business plan is to create new challenges and break old bad habits. We, as salespeople, love our bad habits. A business plan in many ways is like our own higher self keeping ourselves accountable for what we know needs to be done. What better way to catch yourself doing things you no longer wish to do then by reviewing your plan monthly. Or better, have someone else review it with you so that you have a buddy system for your goals?  **You can use our simple one page salesperson business planner to help you with this process. Either way, make sure that your plan has the following attributes:

  1. Measurable goals.
  2. Definable actions.
  3. A process of execution.
  4. KPIs
  5. Opportunities
  6. A system of accountability

You will find a tremendous difference in performance when you start following a plan instead of making it up as you go along. You will accelerate towards your goals, course correct faster than anyone else and set the standard in your company for excellence in selling. And all of that usually means that you’ll make a pretty good income too.

What is Good Sales Training? (and why does it matter?)

Professional Sales Coaching

What is Good Sales Training? (and why does it matter?)

Selling is vital to our businesses and economy, yet why is basic education in this skill so lacking? As a top sales training company, Scorecard Sales asks: how many salespeople went to college to study selling? This skill set drives everything—not only our revenue but how we influence one another. Investing in professional sales coaching is the only way to master these foundational selling skills that are often ignored in traditional education.

Selling, in its primal form, is persuading others to agree with your wants, needs, and ideas. Even in the context of poor results, we resist making an investment in training. We avoid professional sales coaching because we are afraid of new things or ashamed of the “salesperson” label. We accept achieving less than we are capable of simply to avoid the work.

Sales, speaking purely academically, is not that complicated. It’s like basic math. No matter how a teacher tries to “debunk old methods,” the concepts do not change. Professional sales coaching should focus on the fact that closing the deal will always be closing the deal.

An educational blueprint for a sales training curriculum showing the progression from foundational modules to advanced selling techniques

What is Good Sales Training?

Good training should always be simple. You need an effective instructor teaching foundational selling skills through digestible concepts and proper exercises. All professional sales coaching should have homework and quizzes; not just certificates and acronyms. You need a trainer who covers the process in its entirety: from prospecting and presenting all the way through closing.

Good training involves drills. When the foundational selling skills are learned, we need to put them to practice through rehearsal and role-playing. This rehearsal is ongoing; it is not something completed in a week. Once you are in the field, putting your professional sales coaching into practice, role-playing stays relevant as a “Sales Pop Quiz.”

Sales is the most crucial component to any business. It is frightening to see how under-invested companies are in their team’s development. How much value do you put into your training? Or have you been leaving your foundational selling skills mostly to chance?