The Secret to Success in Sales Chris W. Brussalis, President & CEO

How many of us are truly satisfied with the performance of our organizations’ sales?  Anyone with profit and loss responsibilities is driven by the top-line and constantly has an eye to incoming revenues.  Are all of our sales and business development professionals performing equally well?  It’s a rhetorical question.  Typically, we have top, average, and marginal performers and then some that just don’t get it.  How can this be true if we have a system to recruit, select, and train sales professionals in our company?  One main culprit is sales call reluctance, the inhibition that many of us have to initiate contacts with prospective buyers on a consistent basis.  And remedying that call reluctance is the key to top-line performance.

Sales call reluctance is the reason why initiating contact with a potential or even current client or a perfect stranger can cause so much unexplainable anxiety and stress that not contacting them is the more attractive alternative.  It is the reason why 80 percent of salespeople fail in their first year and why some seasoned sales professionals quit in the prime of their game.

The secret to success in any contact-dependent profession is the ability to initiate sufficient contacts with prospective buyers on a consistent basis.  Many people realize this practically and intuitively, but few practice it.  Subsequently, most people are not earning what they’re worth.

Psychologists George W. Dudley and Shannon L. Goodson researched this fear of self-promotion and developed prescriptions or methods for overcoming it in their book The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance®.  Their research produced a list of 12 types of call reluctance, describing the attitudes and behaviors that indicate the presence of sales call reluctance.

For example, one of the types is “over-preparation.”  If someone has a propensity to engage in preparation at the expense of doing, it could seriously threaten their success.  Another type is “yielder.”  This type has a fear of being overly assertive in contacting potential clients, thinking “I don’t want to call or meet with contact X because they are probably too busy,” or “If I contact them again I will look too pushy.”  Yielders tend to focus on the rapport-building and relationship aspects of the sales process at the expense of proactive prospecting and closing.  Dudley and Goodson found that, on average, a salesperson has four of the 12 types of sales call reluctance, and they have developed techniques, now utilized in sports psychology, which can reverse these learned behaviors.

So, how can understanding your sales call reluctance tendencies and the ways to mitigate them help you?  Consider the following scenario.  Assuming two given sales people close 20 percent of the time, if one sales person initiates 40 contacts each day and one initiates only five contacts each day, the first will eventually generate 800 percent more business.  Very simply, less call reluctance leads to more contacts initiated and more business.

Set Goals

As a salesperson, sales manager, or CEO, there are a few steps you can take to optimize your sales force and mitigate call reluctance.  First, and simply, set goals.  Make sure that you have a clear revenue target and the ability to reach that goal.  Determine how many pieces of business you must generate.  Translate those metrics into weekly and daily activities.

Follow Through on Key Priorities

Next, ensure that you have adequate energy to reach those goals.  Lack of energy in generating business surely will lead to low productivity and outcome.  Also, focusing on too many things at once is a common culprit in low sales numbers.  Goal diffusion also will lead to low productivity and performance.  Minimizing your goal diffusion by focusing on key priorities will help to increase your ability to generate business.

Understand Your Type of Sales Call Reluctance

Finally, take a sales call reluctance assessment to identify your sales call reluctance type and then take steps to mitigate it.  Understanding is half the battle.

Every organization should think of itself as a sales organization, so the necessity to initiate contacts is critical.  Not many people feel that they are earning what they are worth in sales – this is the reason that new salespeople and seasoned professionals both invest time and money in countless books and training seminars in an effort to enhance their sales skills.  Dudley and Goodson posit that overcoming call reluctance is a critical step in that endeavor.  Once unburdened by the resistance to call on potential prospects, new and seasoned sales people can capitalize on their skills, ultimately resulting in more and better business.

For more information on how The Hill Group, Inc. can help improve your organization’s sales performance, contact Hill Group President and CEO Chris Brussalis at cbrussalis@hillgroupinc.com or 412.722.1111.

Back to top

Back to News