Salespeople Continue to Suck at Selling? How Leaders Can Bust the Statistics and Win

Recent research findings about consultative selling skills have me stumped. Dave Kurlan, founder of Objective Management Group, (a different OMG acronym you may not have heard of) reports that the average consultative seller competency has not improved much over the last four years

Just 48% of the consultative seller skill set was identified with 350,000 salespeople assessed. That’s only a 1% improvement over 5 years. Ouch!

I find that alarming, hard to believe, and downright depressing. Do you? Yet the research is clear with data gathered from thousands of salespeople assessed each year (over 1 million salespeople in 20 years) using OMG candidate assessments.

How can this be? The information and message to salespeople around the world is clear: buyers don’t want to be pitched or sold to.

They want professional salespeople who:

• Understand their problems, opportunities, wants, and needs
• Don’t waste their time with irrelevant data and details
• Make the experience productive for both parties
• Provide information when and how they need it

What does this mean, leaders?

It means your sales teams have an opportunity! If your competition is selling the same old way with product pitches, ill-timed proposals, and lots of blah blah blah, your team can win!

While top sales people need to consult and collaborate with the buyer, that’s not enough to influence the buyer to pick you.

How do you ensure your sales team wins?

It starts at the top with:

• Knowing the strength of your current sellers’ consultative skills
• Hiring the right people
• Onboarding new sales reps with the right tools and tips to be able to focus on the buyer
• Managers equipped with the time, skill, and mindset to coach effectively (the key to top performing sales teams)
• Compensation and recognition plans aligned with how your people are motivated
• Reinforcement, measurement, and ongoing communication
• Selecting the right sales improvement partner to collaboratively work with you and build the skills needed to win sales against the competition (it’s not as tough as you might think, and we can help!)

This is a blueprint for building a highly effective sales organization that will catapult your team over the competition, reduce price discounting, and build repeatable and referable business.