Selling Trucks With Outdated Selling Techniques

To this business owner, the question that was troubling to him was:

Why is this seller not selling?
He was supposed to sell trucks for this company. But he was not getting results.

What was happening to him?
He was applying ready to hand, very basic and common selling techniques that were unfit to sell trucks. It was like trying to sell airplanes with cosmetics selling techniques.
Let me explain.

Background
This salesman was hired to sell trucks but in the last six months his production was zero. Indeed, he was trying but he wasn't producing any results. His manager, the owner of the business, asked me to see what was happening and to help, if it was possible, him to sell.

A visit to his territory
I asked the seller to schedule at least 5 meetings with his clients so we can visit together and have a look and a close comprehension about what he was doing so he was getting no results.
He picked me up at the airport and immediately started our sales visits.

What was happening?
Our first sales meeting was with the owner of a truck company. He received us in a very friendly mood. In the moment that my client was allowed to talk he started to sell talking only about all the features of his product. He talked and talked and talked. His client, of course, while he was talking (or selling, he called it) was thinking and not very positive things (his body language was speaking louder than his words) about the presentation. My client used a beautiful brochure in this presentation (to cover the inefficiency of his presentation and praying for the brochure do the selling). The buyer, almost at the end of the conversation asked my client about the price, he immediately said it and obviously the buyer told my client that he need time to think about it. It was then when my client, like begging, told the buyer:

• "Please, why don't we start with one (truck)? Only one, please."
  

The buyer told him that he was going to think the offer an he was going to call back in two weeks. (We all know what does that means.) Then we left the office of the buyer. While we were in the car heading to the next interview he, the seller, my client, asked a question I was afraid he was going to ask: "How it was?" I told him that I was going to answer that question after we finish all his scheduled meetings with his clients.

The Next Sales Meetings
The next sales meetings went almost the same. They change their own dynamics because the clients asked several things, but the kind of presentations that my client was doing was essentially the same. The pattern was the same. What were his problems selling? I'm going to list several, but all of them have their roots in the overall selling structure that this salesman had about selling, which I'm going to explain later.

His Mistakes
He:

• never asked any questions and was blind about the client's precise situation of its fleet
  
• relied always in the brochure
• thought that he could close a sale this big (the price of his product was $23,000 USD average) in one meeting
• in three meetings he was selling to the person that has no power to decide
• was almost always talking about features ("the Pearson suspension is the best of all", "the size of the box is better than the others")
• didn't know what to do when the client told him that "...it was too expensive..."

...among others

Causes?
But what was the cause, if any, of this type of selling? He sold, in the last 10 years, truck parts. You can sell a truck part in 2 minutes. Well of course, it depends on the price of the part, but it's closed sale. The salesman is inside the store, the buyer comes in and asks for a specific part, the seller gives him his part, he pays it, and that's it. On the contrary, if 's selling trucks, and visiting potential buyers for that, he needs another type of sales method. He was unable to sell a truck with his "selling truck part techniques".

The Automatic Selling
Other problem was that this "truck parts selling techniques" automatic "used him" in almost every presentation with a potential client AND he didn't noticed that. He wasn't unaware about this and he was visiting potential buyers doing exactly the same thing with each one of them: he was used by the same sales structure he used when he was a parts seller.

The Next Step: the Design of a New Selling Structure
The problem with this kind of situation, and it's very common, is that the seller is unaware that he is being used by a selling structure, with life of his own that doesn't matches the product/service nor with the potential buyer. So the first step is to provoke awareness in the salesman. For a moment, he was in shock with the revelation that he is selling trucks with techniques that are fit more in selling cheap products. Then, the second step is the designing of a new sales process that matches precisely with the product/service he is trying to sell with the potential buyer and/or potential buyers.

The Results?
After several weeks of designing, he started to use the new sales process and also started to close sales.