Sales Slump SOLVED! The 3 Lies Killing Your Close Rate

Rob  00:00

Welcome back, everybody to the slow pitch, and today we’re going to talk a little bit about something called the Stockdale paradox. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s an interesting story, but it also fits into sales in probably a little different style than you think, and we’re going to get right into it. This is The Slow Pitch Podcast.

Rob  00:20

So the Stockdale paradox, it comes from a gentleman named Admiral James Stockdale. He was a US Navy officer. He was a prisoner of war. He was in Vietnam. He was there for over seven years. So he had a lot of really bad conditions that he was in. So he was tortured. He was in isolation that he had essentially no clear end insight. He had no idea whether or not he was going to survive, if he was going to do okay, or if he’s going to die. He had no idea. Yet, in the end, he ended up surviving.

00:51  So later on, there was a gentleman, obviously, most of you have heard of the book Good to Great, by Jim Collins. He interviewed Admiral Stockdale, and he got out of him what helped him survive all that amount of time. And Stockdale said, Don’t confuse faith that you’re going to prevail in the end. In other words, don’t confuse the fact that you’re still going to survive. Don’t confuse that with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.

01:17  So in other words, you may believe in your heart of hearts that you’re going to survive, that’s great. You probably will, but you can’t discount the fact that you may not survive, and you have to confront that reality every day and think of yourself as, hey, I may not survive, so let me just pretend I’m not going to what do I need to do to survive today? Right? So you’re just living day to day, but you’re also focused on the fact that you want to survive.

01:40  So that balance of unwavering belief in ultimate success also paired up with brutal honesty about your current situation is what became known as the Stockdale paradox. How does that fit with sales? Well, to me, it’s everything, because you can’t really afford blind optimism in sales, because if you do, you’re going to be lost.

01:58  Blind optimism doesn’t close deals. Hope is not a strategy, right? I had somebody tell me that long time ago, and I really appreciate him telling that, because I now have to remind myself, hope is not a strategy, right? Because every once in a go, I hope this is going to go it’s not a strategy. You have to really work at it. Make it happen. Do all the things you need to do to make it happen.

Rob  02:17  The Stockdale paradox kind of tells us that the most resilient people are those that hold on to long term beliefs and success while also at the same time confronting the brutal truth that’s not just good for survival, that’s essential for consistent, good, high level selling. So I’ve got a couple points I want to make and couple things I want you to come out with.

02:40  First thing I want you to think of and take away from this is confidence without delusion is going to come make you come out ahead. Let me tell you about a time that I had let a little bit of delusion take over. Several years ago, I had a prospect, and he said all the right things to me, like he just, he sung my praises.

02:53  He said I was going to be the best thing since sliced bread. He was, he was so happy, and he wanted me to do all these different things. He’s like, I’m pretty confident you’re gonna be able to do all these things. I am really excited about this. We’re probably gonna go with you guys. And when he said, we’re probably gonna go with you guys, I didn’t catch it, but that’s the most dangerous language that you’ll ever hear as a salesperson. And why is that?

03:13  It’s because probably is not commitment. He had no commitment, and at the time, I believed him. I stopped pushing him, I stopped asking all the right questions. I didn’t dig into the pains that he had. I didn’t ask about buying process. I didn’t ask about who else needed to be involved in the questions and who else needed to be involved in making the decision.

03:31  I was so confident the deal was going to come through that I was already celebrating in my head, right? Well, guess what? Weeks went by and I didn’t hear anything from the guy, instead of continuing to lie to myself and say, well, he’s just busy, or he probably is still going to close. He’s just not ready yet. Or, you know, whatever the excuses I gave myself, I had to force myself to realize this is not going to happen.

Rob  03:51  And so I called him and I said, Hey, I got to know here are you. You know, at the time, you sounded really excited, but it’s really not quiet. Something has got to must have changed. What happened? Did I did I did? I misunderstand what was going on? So he told me, it turns out I did misread this situation, and he was getting pressure from another vendor that was internal, and his boss was pushing for the cheaper option.

04:10  I didn’t ask the right questions, and I didn’t know that, and because I confronted him head on, not angrily, defensively or anything like that, just had a real good direct conversation. Because of that, I was able to re qualify him as an opportunity, reframed some of the things that we were talking about in pain related situations, and eventually we came back around and won the deal, which I know that sounds weird, but because we positioned the pain as part of the problem and that we were solving those pains, we were able to get him to understand I didn’t present this correctly to my boss.

04:43  My boss didn’t understand the whole situation, and needed to understand that better. We were able to get some things done that maybe weren’t normal, but it happened to turn out okay, but I literally was using hope as my strategy. It did not work, by the way, that client also told me later on that, you know, the fact that you didn’t disappear or kind of tip toe around. Issue, or whatever the he was.

05:01  That was one of the reasons why he wanted to work with us, and that because of that, he was able to kind of get that spun around again the right way. But that’s one of those situations where if you’re not paying attention, then you’re going to miss out. And you have to understand when you have delusions of not reality, like you just don’t think what is really happening is actually happening, or vice versa, and you’re not matching the reality with what you should be thinking about. That’s a problem. If you’re having problems, moving people to the next step, that’s normal. It’s okay.

05:29  We can help you work through those problems and make it so that things happen as they’re supposed to. If you have questions about your business and about something that you’re doing in sales or a process that you want to improve, pick up the phone. Give us a call. The second takeaway I want you to remember is that a slump does not mean you’re failing, unless you want to lie to yourself, then hey, it does mean you’re failing.

Rob  05:48  So here’s another example, I guess, a few few years ago, I hit a tough sales slump, and of course, I called my mentor. I had to go through some stuff with him, so that helped. But we had all kinds of leads. We had, whatever estimates. Kind of had conversations that were almost there. We were trying to bring them across the finish line, but nothing seemed to be closing.

06:09  And I kind of started telling myself that, boy, it’s just maybe it’s the season that we’re in. I don’t know. I know people are on vacation. I know the budgets are tight. I started kind of making up excuses for people, instead of looking kind of in the mirror and just saying, hey, you know what? You know what the common thread is here?

06:23  It’s me. I’m the problem here. I’m not digging into some of the problems that are going on and what they need, and I’m not looking at it from the client’s perspective. I was looking at it from my perspective. So what did I do? I sat down, I pulled up my pipeline. I realized something really uncomfortable, the people that were in my pipeline, some of them shouldn’t be there, and I thought those people, some of the bigger ones, I did not qualify well enough.

06:45  Because I did, I had gotten lazy. I was just filling the funnel with hopeful people instead of prospects that actually had pain. I was having some good conversations, but at the same time the tough questions that I should be asking about why they wanted to buy or what their process was, or, you know, how they made decisions, any of those types, they didn’t ask those questions.

07:05  So what did I do? I went back. I reset them. I kind of started going back after the pain on each one of them. Asked them some questions, like, is this still a reality? If not, why are we even talking? I shouldn’t probably even be talking to you anymore, right? In this, this other pain is that? Is that still an issue? Yes. How much of a pain is that? How much did that cost them every day for not doing anything? Those types of questions, right?

07:26  So by going through those pain questions and getting the budget worked out that way, and starting to slow down, things started to happen. And moving forward, they started to understand the things that they needed to get fixed. We’re not getting fixed just by themselves, and they needed some help.

Rob  07:41  And so we were able to go through those kinds those conversations that slump wasn’t bad luck, by the way, it was me. I had a bad process. I wasn’t doing all the right things, and I stopped being honest with myself. So again, slump doesn’t mean you’re failing, but if you want to lie to yourself, it very well could me. So keep that in mind. The third takeaway is, if you have optimism without action is a trap. It’s a problem.

08:03  I once had somebody that I was working with. I was kind of mentoring him and working through all these things that he needed help with. In sales. He had a ton of optimism in the world, and generally in the world, and he was obviously new in sales, but he was really sharp. And every time I checked in with him, he’d say things like, I’ve got a few solid leads in the works. I know these people are going to close. I think this one’s really good, and it’s going to have it’s going to happen. I can feel it.

08:24  The problem was he wasn’t taking any action to move them forward. He wasn’t following up very well. He wasn’t setting the next steps. He wasn’t asking some of those pain questions that we just went through. He was just letting them hang out in that hope zone. They ain’t going to close themselves. You have to work them through then they close themselves, and you’re doing it strategically in such a way that they do close themselves, that’s the key.

08:46  So eventually, with him, I asked him, What’s the last real thing you did to move the deal forward on this particular conversation we were having? And he paused, and he said, You know what? I’m just waiting to hear back from them. And I said to him, that’s not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy. That’s hopium that, right? That don’t smoke the hopium. You don’t want to do that.

09:03  Optimism is great. You can do that all day long. It can keep you going. But if you’re not pairing that with clear, focused, actionable steps, you got optimism to the nth degree, and you shouldn’t be doing it. You’ve had too much hope and not enough reality. No, at the time, he didn’t like hearing it, but to his credit, he heard it. He changed. He built out kind of the next we kind of worked through this a little bit together.

09:25  We had a conversation about it. He built out the next step for every deal, and he committed to kind of following up on those different pieces that he was missing on each one. We went through each one, and I started asking him questions that were more specific to the deal and what he knew about them, and he didn’t know some of the answers. And so when we started tackling those hard questions, we started to realize those are the questions you need to start to ask them.

Rob  09:45  And within a month, he really started to close some a couple of these smaller deals, and then they started getting some of these bigger ones. He hoped it would happen, but because he turned around, went back, we worked on those strategies that he needed to take for the next steps for each one of them, what were some of the questions they needed to ask? When he did all that stuff, he started to make it all happen.

10:02  Things started to come together like they were supposed to. To wrap this all up together. Let’s do this. Let’s you gotta there’s a couple things you got to remember. The things I want you to take away. I don’t want you to be overly optimistic. You don’t want to get blindsided by a loss deal.

10:14  You want to you want to know that it’s coming. You should always know that this project or this client is not going to close. I’ve had several conversations in the last three or four weeks that I say I know this person is not going anywhere, and I’m working to close them out and get rid of them.

10:28  I know this one is going to close and I know this one is 70% there, but they’re not there because I’m not asking these three questions yet, and we haven’t gotten that far yet. You need to know where those things are. You have to believe you’re going to win and confront what’s the problem? It’s not having that mindset that you’re gonna everything’s all roses. It’s roses plus reality, and that’s putting that all stuff together, right?

Rob  10:50  So the Stockdale paradox, just coming back to that isn’t a mindset for just surviving, right? It’s a blueprint, in a sense, for consistent success in sales. If you’re going to be able to do this, if you’re in a slump, diagnose it honestly. If you’re feeling confident, back it up with action. Show it. Prove it. Prove it to yourself you’re confident this is going to close. Let’s prove it. Let’s pick up the phone.

11:08  Let’s call them. Hey, I’m just checking in. These are the pains you’re still working through, right? Whatever that was, those are, this is the problem. This is the problem. This problem. And I know we talked about we were going to be able to solve this in this timeframe. We were going to be able to do this. I know your decisions with this, what was the next step here? I think you we seem to be holding here, what? What’s the next step right?

11:25  Now, help me understand, I don’t remember where you said we were. There’s nothing better than calling somebody back and going, I don’t remember what our next step was. Even though you do, even though you do, you know, they’ll tell you what their next step is.

11:35  And if they say, Oh, I don’t have a next step, you know, it’s not going to go anywhere, right? If this episode helped you with a little bit of clarity on how to do some of these types do some of these types of things, I want you to share it with somebody else in your circle who’s getting kind of a problem here.

11:47  You keep hitting problems at walls, because, let’s be honest, everybody needs help at some point with just working through one of those issues, asking yourself brutally, what is going on. And to wrap it up tightly, confidence without delusion is going to be the best route. A slump does not mean that you’re failing, and optimism without any action is a problem, and don’t fall for it right until next time remember slow down and close more.

V/O  12:12  Thank you for listening to The Slow Pitch. Do you have a question about sales? Call or text your question at (608) 708-SLOW. That’s (608) 708-7569 or you can email them to Questions at TheSlowPitch.com. Slow Down and Close More.