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Have you ever had someone give you a sales pitch on something you clearly had no need for or no interest in? You stopped listening and began to think of the excuses you would use just to get out! Sound familiar?

Presentation of a detailed solution without first clearly understanding the problem and more importantly the ramifications of the identified problem is a recipe for objections and excuses. It leads to wasted time, energy and a drain on self-esteem. Excuses from prospects create overloaded pipelines which in turn creates a complacency in your sales people with regard to new business development.

The typical traditional salesperson spends his or her career wasting their time pitching, presenting and demonstrating towards surface issues, or problems that their prospect has been managing to date. The premature sales pitch is then followed by the handling of objections, which are often excuses and reasons for not making a decision. After all, would you make a buying decision regarding an issue that in your own mind is not essential or critical, in particular when your budget is tight?

Unpaid consulting starts when sales people cross the line between diagnosing the prospect’s problem and detailing the solution. In other words the sales person provides a solution without first uncovering the negative effects the prospect suffered in the past and future negative effects the prospect will incur if the problem isn’t fixed.

This eagerness to provide premature solutions can be attributed to the traditional sales training provided by most companies to new sales recruits: Feature-Benefit based training. Therefore, unknowingly companies put their sales people in a position where they automatically try to fix a problem the prospect has not yet concluded requires a fee based solution.

When sales people begin to present detailed solutions, without first allowing the prospect to acknowledge a problem exists, and that this problem merits a solution they immediately begin acting as unpaid consultants. It is this common sales method that wastes your company’s time and money and reduces your opportunity for growth.