Time Strategies: Are You Sitting in the Coffee Shop Licking Your Wounds?

After a poor sales conversation do you get off tracking spending time and energy feeling sorry for yourself? You may not be consciously aware that you're doing it, but what do you do immediately after a sales call that doesn't work out? In essence, many salespeople call time out.

I’m not discouraging you from taking a time out. In fact, I’m encouraging you to take a time out. But it’s how you use that time out that will provide a real benefit for you.

During prime selling time it’s not uncommon to find salespeople sitting in the local coffee shop reading the paper. A poor sales conversation can be really upsetting even demoralizing. You need time to regroup before you head to the next one, so you don’t have a repeat of the previous experience.

While the experience is fresh in your mind it’s the best time to actually learn from the experience, and make adaptations so you don’t repeat it. In all likelihood you got a stall or objection, or you just didn’t connect from the start and never had a conversation with the other person to begin with. If you’re going to get value from this experience there are a couple things you need to do.

Identify the point where things started to go wrong. If you didn’t connect from the onset, was it because: you didn’t do your homework before making the appointment, you didn’t adapt your communication style to one that was more comfortable to the prospect, or did you try to sell the prospect and manipulate them to do what you wanted them to do not what was best for them? Did you fail to listen to what the prospect was saying causing the prospect to feel disrespected?

If you don’t know it, when you get a stall or objection when your solution is a good match for the prospect it’s because you didn’t help the prospect to discover the value in your solution. That means you either don’t understand the buying process, or you just need more practice. But in the meantime all is not lost.

Make a list of all the stalls and objections you know you’ll get or could get. Here are some common general objections:

• I don’t have enough money
• It’s too complicated or too simple
• It isn’t all that important to me
• I’ll just wait and do it later
• I want to look into other options.

Start with these and add to your list until you’ve thought of as many as possible. Now start thinking of examples and stories of other people or other situations where people thought these things too. Use stories to make a point that removes the validity of that objection for the prospect.

Stories are a non-threatening way of getting the prospect to look at things from another perspective. They help people to gain a deeper understanding, and they increase your connection with the prospect. As you work through this thought process you’ll start to regain your confidence and get fired up for the next insurance sales conversation, and you’ll be much better prepared when you get there.