Lost customers? Find out ways to turn it into a success story

To the casual observer, the fluidity with which a top performer adapts to a challenge may be hard to distinguish from the clueless reactions of poor performers. Both seem to be rolling with the punches. As the customer shifts, both the top performer and the clueless performer shift but in very different, often subtle ways.

If lucky, the clueless performer may get an order, but it’s really any persons guess. Top performers are different. Yes, like the clueless performer, as the customer shifts in their buying process, they shift but through skilled adaptation, not clueless reactions. What’s the difference?

To be skilled in adaptation, one has to first master all the basics.  We have to be expert in using our sales process and mastering our sales skills.  We must understand the alternatives the customer may consider–our competitors, doing nothing, or doing it themselves.  We must be deeply knowledgeable about both our own products and services, but also about our customers’ businesses, strategies, priorities, markets, competition and customers.

These provide a framework or context of what creates success.  It provides a framework for the high performer to evaluate the current situation.  To assess, what’s driving the customer, what has may have caused them to react a certain way, to have turned left when we expected them to turn right.  It’s the ability to assess what’s happening, understand why, and purposefully determine next steps to achieve their goals that drives the skilled adaptation by the top performer.

Without this framework, without being masters in leveraging and executing it, the sales person is clueless in assessing, “How do I adjust my strategies and execute to get the outcomes I want?”  It’s the absence of this that causes everyone else to cluelessly react.  Rather than driving the situation, they are driven by all the customer, competition, and lack of knowledge.

Skilled adaptation requires more, it requires constant learning, constant refinement of our base models and frameworks.  It requires recognizing those things that no longer contribute to success and quickly adding those new things critical to success.  Stated differently, it’s the Agility, Jill Konrath refers to in Agile Selling.

Read full story to find out more secrets to performance Skilled Adaptation Or Clueless Reactions? | Partners in EXCELLENCE Blog — Making A Difference