A Frustrating Experience

I recently received a call from a company performing a reference check on an individual claiming to come out of our program. Before you jump to conclusions, let me clarify, I am not frustrated because the individual listed us as a reference – the individual in question did not graduate but was terminated in the third week. Nice guy but couldn’t get over one of our hurdles.

I am frustrated because the company performing the reference check is a past client who contracted with a recruiter to help them find sales people. What’s wrong with that? Nothing -except for the fact that this company has hired four of our graduates and readily acknowledges these as ‘the best performers they have ever hired.’

So how does it come to pass that – when everyone is sitting around discussing the need to hire another inside sales person – we are not the first and only suggestion that comes up?

Seriously…this should be the easiest decision of the day!

Instead, my guess is the conversation went something like: ‘Hey, I know this recruiter who can surf the web and find us a bunch of resumes that everyone else has access to so we can do a bunch of interviews that waste a lot of our time because most of those candidates are no good and then we can find one that is not that bad and we can call Three Value Logic to find out that this candidate wasn’t even good enough to finish their program!’

Naturally, as soon as I learned what was happening, I called the CEO (whom I know personally -talk about insult to injury!) and asked him why he would even consider pursuing such an illogical and unproductive course of action. Basically, he didn’t have an answer and acknowledged that, upon reflection, it seemed kind of a strange thing to do.

Since this incident, I have spent a lot of time thinking about why this happened and the best I can come up with is the following: ‘Calling a recruiter is nothing more than a bad habit.’

That’s right…it is simply a form of habitual behavior that will take time and patience to help our clients overcome. Much like starting your day with that jelly donut instead of a fruit cup; calling a recruiter falls under the category of ‘we have always done it this way.’

Much as it pains me to acknowledge this – It is up to us to consistently and lovingly remind our prospects and clients that it is in their best interest to work with us. I don’t mean this in an entirely pejorative way. I actually believe there is a valuable sales lesson for everyone contained herein.

Three Value Logic comes from the perspective that selling is a straightforward science. I say that selling is straightforward because it is comprised of a limited number of non-complex activities yet these non-complex activities must be performed consistently and flawlessly over time. Much of traditional sales training is simply a refresher course on the knowledge of what we a) know intuitively to be true or b) learned sometime in the past but have simply gotten out of the habit of putting into practice.

The ‘reminder’ in this case for me is simple. No matter how compelling your value proposition; No matter how intuitively obvious it is (to you the salesperson) that a prospect should be doing business with you; No matter how many times you have done business together and; No matter how close you perceive your relationship to be - It is your responsibility and your responsibility alone to understand what the prospect believes they need (at that point in time, in their own mind, and in their own words.) It is then your responsibility and your responsibility alone to position the value of doing business with you. Stated simply, it is not your customer’s job to do the selling…unless you enjoy being frustrated.

If you get a chance, please post a comment about a time you took a customer for granted or simply assumed they would call you first or buy from you. What happened? What did you do? How did you feel about it? How did it work out?