Numbers game or not?

Auto Dialler's, burnout and quantity versus quality... Sales has become a numbers game because someone told us it was. This is not to say that making a hundred calls in a day is not going to yield any results because it will. The problem is that at the end of the day you have left a bad taste in several potential customers mouths. You have also decided that you are going to have a ton of turnover because of burnout and probably did not take the time with the sales you did make to give them the right solution. Having said all that, you can't make sales without making calls or visiting customers.

So, how do you know how many sales calls to make in order to be successful you might ask. I have a better question. What do we need to do to be successful? First we need to be deprogrammed. Then we need to look within ourselves and figure out how we buy and how we like to be sold to. Why do we think sales is a numbers game when none of us want to be treated like a number? Sales is about relationship and we have all heard this before but not many of us really apply that to our strategies. What if our sales calls were approached as if we just really wanted to understand what is working and what isn't within our customers environment? What if we approached our sales calls without having a product or service solution already in mind without having yet talked to our customer?

Understanding customer requirements, building relationships and waiting to provide a solution until we truly understand the needs and wants of our customers is the mark of a true sales person. The numbers game is only for those who cannot sell.