The Value of Professional One-on-One Coaching

I was asked to do one-on-one coaching with a veteran, very successful saleswoman at a kitchen company.

I was told she'd been considered an excellent seller for years, but for the past two months her sales had dropped to zero... The branch manager asked me to get her back on track.

I listened in passively on her meeting with a customer who'd come in with his interior designer. I could spot quite a few tactical mistakes worth working on, but I put most of my effort into finding the source of the slump.

After a whole process that took about two hours, it was time to price the kitchen they'd just designed. The computer came up with 32,000 shekels, after a certain discount.

At that point the customer announced that he wouldn't pay more than 24,000 shekels, because another company had quoted him that price for exactly the same design...

When we sat down to debrief, I asked her: "At what point in the sale did you find out he'd already been to another company?"

"At the end, after I named the price," she answered.

"And at what point did you find out he was expecting around 24,000 shekels?" I asked.

And she answered: "At the end."

I should point out that she was one of the finest saleswomen I've ever known, at a company whose people outsell their "colleagues" at other companies beyond all proportion.

She knew perfectly well, of course, that this information is absolutely crucial and has to be uncovered during the needs analysis.

"What stopped you from asking about it yourself during the needs analysis?" I asked, and she replied, very upset: "The last time I tried to find out, the customer in front of me exploded at me, yelling and cursing: 'The nerve! What kind of questions are these? What do you care what I did or didn't do? Why should I tell you what I was offered and where?'..."

"I was traumatized and stopped asking," she added.

"When did that happen?" I asked.

"Two months ago," she answered...