Why Do Sales Teams LOSE? – Rely solely on face-to-face interactions (9-10)

As mentioned, I’m going to present reasons why companies win and lose sales deals. These reasons were outlined by Ron Sathoff, a colleague of mine, in a great article for SAMA magazine called “Five Ways to Bolster Your Strategic Account Strategy, and Five Ways to Sabotage it.” (The article is available for download HERE)

This article was written to help answer the ultimate sales question, “How can we win a lot more deals?” In order to find the answer, Ron started by addressing the questions, “Why do we win and why do we lose?” Each of these points were taken from a library of thousands of win loss sales debriefs and compiled into performance rankings.

9. Rely solely on face-to-face interactions.

In the movie “Jerry Maguire,” a sports agent is referred to as the “King of the house calls. Master of the living room.” It seems that many sales representatives see themselves in this same light, assured that they can make the sale as soon as they can get some “face time” with the customer. However, you can’t be a master of the living room if you don’t get invited into the house, and according to many of the respondents, the most common invitation that gets lost is the RFP. The complexity of a strategic account requires a well-thought-out plan, and many customers determined the organizational skills of a supplier by the proposals that it submitted. By treating the RFP as a mere hoop that must be jumped through, account managers damaged their chances of success.

Some of the responses indicated that problems in response to an RFP were a sign that the supplier did not understand the situation or the project requirements, that the supplier did not have experience creating proposals or, as one respondent explained, that the supplier was trying to hide something:

“When we issued the RFP, [Company 1] was the only one that declined to offer pricing. It presented a nice package, but declined to give us this information. When I saw the pricing, after I threatened to reject them out of hand, I understood why it didn’t want to give it to me.”

In cases like these, the account managers would have to work extremely hard to rebuild the confidence and trust that was lost due to poorly constructed responses. Personal interactions are important. You cannot build a strong relationship without them. The opportunity for a personal interaction may never occur, however, unless you have built a strong case for why the customer should consider meeting with you in the first place.