Are Your Salespeople “Bare Knuckle Selling?”

It is an old-school sales approach from the 1950s through the mid-1980s. Your sales team was given a goal, and they were to just make it happen.

Business owners were focused on the objective of achieving the financial performance goals they needed and wanted hungry sales teams chasing, catching, and wrestling buyers to the ground to win purchase orders.

It was all about what we wanted.

It felt wrong to even then, but that is what we were paid to do. It was much like the movie; Fight Club, and the #1 rule of fight club is… “Don’t talk about fight club!”

For years salespeople went out with their sales bags full of brochures and returned with orders, and we often didn’t want to know how. It was like sales was some dark art business owners did not want to know about.

They just needed the profitable sales volume.

The trouble arises when sales teams today approach buyers as they did 10-15 or 30 years ago.

In my sales seminars, I used to refer to this sales method as Bare Knuckle Selling.

Sales teams who rely on bare-knuckle sales today fail to execute the sales plan and miss the profit objectives for their companies. As the Book Insight Selling shares, buyers today do not want to be sold. They want to be presented with innovative ideas.

Teams with no strategy are forced into bare-knuckle selling; each year, their performance toward sales goals suffers.

Bare Knuckle Sales involves your sales team cold calling buyers who should need the products they sell ( you have no idea if they do).

Teams who practice bare-knuckle selling focus on their goals and not their customers’ problems. They sound like commission junkies needing their next fix (and buyers today pick up on that within the first few seconds of a call).

Bare-knuckle sales teams have little if any marketing and sales strategy, and their websites are virtual brochures that often share how great they are and how long they have been great, but fail in SEO Key Word Optimization, have no content strategy, and never speak in a voice of the problems you solve for your customers.

When you challenge the leaders of a team like this, you will hear phrases like; “we don’t need a content strategy. We have been in this industry for 20 years and never needed it before” and “we need our salespeople to overcome objections and close not ask a bunch of questions…” and my personal favorite; ” we cannot afford expensive marketing!” Since the people who often challenge you most are accounting and finance types, we need to redirect the conversation to the opportunity cost of not having a marketing strategy.

Are your salespeople Bare Knuckle Selling today?

How would you know?

Below are ten quick questions I would ask you, and let’s see how you would answer them.

1. Do your salespeople clearly understand the problem(s) your product or service solves?
2. Have you seen your gross margins increase in the last three years?
3. Do you know your close rate on quotes? And why did you win or lose?
4. Have you produced new sales tools in the last 12 months?
5. Has your website been updated in the last six months?
6. What are the top 3 market segments your team should target this year and why?
7. Does your team have a sales strategy and process other than cold calling?
8. Do you have a lead nurturing program?
9. Can you tell me the process and criteria your buyers are using today?
10. If I asked your sales VP what the ideal customer for your product or service can they answer me?

How would you answer the above questions?

If you answered “no” or “I don’t know” to six or more of the above questions, your team is Bare Knuckle Selling and losing new business you could and should be winning.

Please share your thoughts and experience….

Is your team Bare Knuckle Selling?

Would you like a road map on how to stop Bare Knuckle Selling and start hitting and blowing by your crucial performance objectives?

Sales teams today do not need to be like Fight Club.

The #1 rule of sales today is openly discussing your repeatable sales process, and your team must constantly assess how your buyers are buying and what criteria they must have to make buying decisions.