Sales isn’t easy. It if were, trust me, everyone would be doing it. It amazes me how so many non sales people in an organization think sales is some sort of lottery ticket, where sales people sit around making mounds of money they didn’t deserve. BTW: I always welcome those people to put 1/2 their salary on the line and join the ranks of sales. Surprising, not many folks take me up on that offer.
Hmm? I just don’t get it.
For those of us in the know, sales is hard. It takes grit, and determination. It takes an amazing aptitude for solving problems. It requires out of the box creativity. Selling is no joke and it’s hard.
With that said, what makes selling difficult or hard varies from sales person to sales person. So, I’m curious. What’s the hardest part of selling or sales to you?
Let’s see if we can get a good conversation going in the comments and find out what it is that sales people find most difficult about sales.
What say ye?
The hardest part about selling is when you’re paired up with leadership that has no clue what sales is about nor has had any success doing it themselves.
Yup, that makes selling very hard. Great point, I’ve talked about that before. Organizations have a responsibility to support sales as much as sales has a responsibility to sell.
With that, what do you think is the hardest part of the actual selling process?
Thanks for the comment and kicking off the discussion.
New to the blog Keenan. Enjoying it. Good question. I’d say the hardest part is doing it all – and efficiently. It’s a different world. Salespeople should be teaching, nurturing, learning, prospecting, selling, networking, and oh yeah, closing, probably all in the same day, right? How to do it all – and do it well?
I think the hardest part is balancing on the line between being assertive in the sales process steering it to closure and keeping it conversational without being too pitchy or salesy and asking the proper open ended questions to get the prospect to open up about what true objections or concerns there may be as opposed to “thinking about it”.
Great point Joe, most sales people struggle with this tension. Too many sales people default to being the “nice” guy and end up being the customers bitch. I wrote about this about two years ago; http://asalesguy.com/2012/10/02/dont-be-the-customers-bitch/
Thanks Joe, good stuff, completely agree with you.
I am new to Sales and I am loving your blog. Thanks for making the effort. For me the hardest part is waiting. I come from a telecom background and our products are specialized for Industrial space, which in my part of the world, is not a huge vertical to sell to. The opportunities are limited and take tremendous amount of time to close.
I just think I need to find more opportunities to be able to constantly push and not worry about the waiting period a typical opportunity goes through.
Keenan,
Based on your experience, what are the tools a modern sales man can use to fill up the opportunity pipeline in Energy/Industrial sector? I love reaching out to people on Social media and I am happy to add other tools to my bag. I have a good network but not the best; still learning.
Cheers.
An, a couple of good tools to look at are Salesloft and Kitedesk (if you have Salesforce.com)
The sales automation space is blowing up. There are new tools coming everyday. I can’t seem to keep up with them all. Check out this graphic listing many of them by space. http://asalesguy.com/2014/03/27/are-sales-organizations-ready-signs-are-pointing-to-no/
This would be a good place to start. Each person/sales organization can have different needs, so I recommend playing with as many as you can till you find those that work for you.
Enjoy my man!
The hardest part? The discipline to be the very best at what you do. Sales is hard but we make it harder by not researching our prospects and customers, by not forward scheduling, by not having well developed key account plans, by not utilizing our CRM systems, by putting off to tomorrow what should be done today, by chickening out when a prospect objects, by playing the commodity game just to land a sale. Time and time again, I see the difference between greatness and lameness as the discipline to do what is obvious to most but habit to a few.
A lot of sales people find it difficult to keep up with all the different accounts that they work. I know that one was of my problems. When you deal with a long list of clients, you may tend to forget the specifics of every account. When you don’t know the specifics of the account, your clients feels like you don’t know them, which makes it more difficult to sale to them. There are tools out there to help sales reps…I found this article about how an order entry system can help improve overall customer relations: http://info.nowcommerce.com/blog/sales-rep-software-improves-customer-relations