As you might guess, the money weakness effects fewer competencies than the need to be liked. Where the need to be liked has an impact on sales effectiveness in 7 of 21 sales competencies, discomfort discussing finances impacts only 4 of those sales competencies. See the table below.
It should not be a surprise that this weakness has an impact on the Value Seller (47% less effective), Qualifier (50% less effective) and Negotiator (46% less effective) competencies. What might be surprising is the overall impact it has on Sales Percentile (they score 69% worse overall) and Opportunity Probability. Salespeople who are uncomfortable having the financial conversation are 50% less likely to close their opportunities than those who are uncomfortable! That’s huge! Coincidentally (we are measuring different things here), that is the same difference as in the Qualifier competency. Cool!
But the big story here is not the difference in effectiveness. In my opinion, there are two big stories with discomfort talking about money.
- Wasted time and energy – just think about the calls, meetings, visits, quotes, proposals and people that were involved in the HALF of opportunities that didn’t close. That is a huge waste.
- Lost opportunity – think about two numbers – either the value of a customer, account or deal and the number of customers, accounts or deals in a year. Let’s pretend that a deal is worth an average of $25,000 and each salesperson closes an average of 4 per month or 48 per year. That comes out to $1.2 million. If a salesperson with this weakness is wasting 50% of his opportunities, that is $1.2 million in lost opportunities – PER SALESPERSON – with this weakness!
While the need to be liked can take many months to overcome, overcoming one’s discomfort discussing finances is more of a decision to simply have these conversations. So if you have this weakness, the $1.2 million dollar question is, are you ready to double your sales?
