Why Salespeople Fail: Sandler Submarine

Why are some salespeople very successful and others fail miserably? This is a question that haunts a lot of CEOs and leaders in organizations. And the team members themselves, they want to know how to get better at sales. And usually when we find someone struggling, we can look no further than their sales process.

And above you'll see a picture of Sandler Sales Training sales process. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. But It's kind of a picture of a traditional sales process and how that would work. And what most people, including myself, didn't understand until several years ago, 'cause I'd been in the marketing function up until seven years ago when I became a coach, is that in the sales process, you have to do some things very, very effectively and very, very well in order to succeed.

And it's not just about coming out and giving a pitch, which is what most people think sales is. Sales is a lot of listening. And this is what I found out as I got a more thorough understanding of how sales actually worked. It's I had to spend time learning, understanding the pain in the mind of the consumer.

And what that meant was that I had to have a sales process that closely mirrored what you see above. And a lot of salespeople, when they fail, they are not using the steps above as outlined by Sandler. I certainly hope the Sandler people aren't annoyed by me using a picture of their service mark included. And honestly, Sandler needs to get this submarine image out a lot more because it does help a lot of people.

And I find it fascinating. They really don't share this as sort of the hallmark of their system or their offering because it is very, very easy to understand and very, very easy to work through. So just a quick walkthrough on the submarine. You'll see that their sales process includes, and of course, this is a salesperson working with a prospect.

It is bonding and rapport, meaning can I build a connection with the customer? Number two is upfront contract. Really what that means is can I set expectations about the next meeting or about our current meeting that we're in right now, what's going to happen at the end of it, what step are we in, what do we expect to happen next? So setting very clear expectations throughout the sales process.

Number three, it's the pain step. And step number three is, do I know and understand the prospect's pain? And we're gonna come back to this in greater detail. Number four involves budget.

Do we know if they have budget for the decision? Number five, decision. Are there others involved in the decision-making process? What other factors could influence that?

And if we get really, really good knowledge of those first few steps of the pain, we build rapport, we set expectations, we understand pain, we understand budget, we understand decision, We'll get to the close, which is the fulfillment step. They should just call that close. We get to the fulfillment step, which is actually pretty easy if we do our job right up front. And that gets us into post-sale behaviors, which means are we following up consistently?

Are we getting to a next sale and being referred to others throughout that process? And there's a lot more that that involves, but we're going to focus very early on here in the process because that is where most people fail. And yes, you could fail at any of these three areas up front. You could fail at building rapport.

You could fail at setting expectations. And you could fail at pain. Where you will find most people will fail is at the pain step. They will either one go into a pitch too quickly before they understand the prospect's pain, or they will not effectively use questions to be able to get deeper and deeper into the prospect's pain to understand it.

Use those questions to also not just understand the pain, but understand what has to be done in order to effectively mitigate the pain. You will usually fail at the pain step. So with salespeople that are ineffective, one of the places we look is what are you doing? What kind of questions are you asking in what we call the discovery process when you first meet with the client to understand their pain?

More effectively. Because again, in order to make sales work effectively, you have to be aspirin. You cannot be a vitamin. You have to take the pain away.

So what we want to do is know and understand what that pain is. And the better and better we are at using questions about where the prospect is, what their needs are, what they're currently using that's not working, what would happen if that pain were to be taken away? How the world would change in the future for them if they were to be able to solve that problem? What are the specific things that they would need to see to be able to see success?

Those are the kinds of questions that help get deeper into the prospect problem and help salespeople succeed. Now, you know, this doesn't happen in every sales process. Clearly, what I'm going to describe next. But as a coach, it's really fascinating.

People will usually have kind of a basic understanding of what I do as a business coach. And I will meet with CEOs and I can spend up to an hour and a half in some cases talking about them, understanding their pain, really trying to learn and get to know more about them before I even talk about what I do as a coach. And by the time we get to that point of where I understand exactly where they are, what their pain points are, what needs to be changed in their world in order to feel successful, It's usually pretty easy for them to be able to make a selection as me as a coach for me as a coach. And honestly, my pitch is about 30 seconds long at that point.

And that's what's fascinating. And something I've learned about this process, becoming a better sales person, again, someone who was mostly in the marketing function, really didn't participate in sales, didn't know how to close from learning how to just effectively be able to do those first three steps, bond and rapport, set expectations about, you know, what's going to happen in the meeting we're in, and then being able to surface pain effectively made me a thousand times more effective. I learned that I will close if I can get through those first three steps, but predominantly, if I can raise pain enough to the point where the salesperson really has no other choice but to choose me because they feel like that will be the absolute panacea for their pain. So I hope this helps everyone understand where they can help their sales team succeed more effectively.

And again, if you want great sales training, you know, this is not a promotional video, but I love Sandler and I was given very effective sales training with the Sandler folks. So highly look into it and use the submarine.