According to Dave Kurlan, author of Mindless Selling and developer of the Dave Kurlan Sales Profile, there are five major weaknesses that impact success in selling. The most powerful of those is Buy Cycle.
According to Kurlan, “Buy Cycle refers to the process by which salespeople make purchases for themselves. Because salespeople use the same paradigm for buying and selling they will tolerate behavior from their prospects when it is similar and consistent to their own. A buy cycle that fails to align itself with an ideal selling process causes many of the obstacles that salespeople are unable to handle effectively.
For instance a sales person who is a “comparison shopper” when it comes to spending their money will tolerate the same behavior from their prospect because subconsciously it makes sense to do so. Same thing with “I Want To Think It Over”. A non-supportive buy cycle also makes salespeople more vulnerable to stalls, put offs, lies, excuses, sob stories, procrastinators, price shoppers, and researchers.
Salespeople with this weakness agree with the prospect’s reasons for wishing to think things over. Therefore, the prospect’s wish is granted, business is either lost or delayed, and the salesperson wastes a tremendous amount of time performing unnecessary follow-up”.
Despite attempts to tell or train salespeople what they should do in these situations, they continue to say or do things that don’t achieve the desired outcome. Why? Because they cannot escape their own internal programming.
The only solution to this problem is for salespeople to change the way they make purchases. This is not some technique to be learned in any class. This is about personal CHANGE. When salespeople change their buy cycles to support the selling process, the stalls and put-offs that used to derail their process will become momentary delays in a single sales call.
One of the most successful characteristics of high performance individuals is their ability to make decisions. Learn to become a decision maker because “only decision makers can get others to make decisions”. Your role as a sales person is to get the prospect to say either “Yes I do or No I don’t. You can only do this if you BECOME that kind of person yourself.