Why Prospects Don’t Like Salespeople

Salespeople tend to have a pretty poor reputation across most industries. The standard image of a salesman is the hair slicked back, fast-talking guy who will say or do anything to close a deal. That negative perception, combined with the poor reputation around accountability that already plagues the security industry, makes it extremely tough for salespeople and business development managers at security firms to really connect with potential customers.

To effectively counter customers’ natural dislike of salespeople, we first have to understand it. Why don’t prospects like salespeople, and what can we do to get them over that initial dislike?

Poor timing and invasive tactics

Property and facility managers have incredibly stressful and chaotic jobs. They have to deal with frustrated residents, tenants, employees, and vendors, and report back to higher ups in the corporate office. Their days are filled with putting out one fire after another, and if you call during the middle of all this then you’re just adding to their stress.

That’s the last thing you want to do. First impressions are powerful, and the first impression the manager has of you is someone that creates more work and headaches rather than less.

A simple way to get around this is to go through whoever the gatekeeper is for the property manager: personal assistant, secretary, office manager, whoever. Ask that person when the best time to reach the decision maker is, and how they’d like to be contacted, whether it’s email, phone, or in person.

This is such a small thing, but it shows your willingness to work with the prospect and to fit into their established processes. Building a genuine working relationship with the assistant or office manager is worth as much as any technique, because they are the person who decides whether your message reaches the decision maker at a useful moment.

Too focused on “me”

Prospects care much more about their own business than they do about yours. Despite this fact, a lot of salespeople spend the vast majority of their pitch talking about themselves, focusing on how their company is the best in the business and bragging about their capabilities.

Some bragging is necessary, but the truth is that prospects want to hear more about what you can do for them. Rather than talking about your own company, talk about their business and the problems they face, and use that as a way to transition into the opportunities to partner together and solve these problems. The same principle governs the document that follows the meeting, which is why your security proposals should not be about you either.

Again, this shows that you’re willing to be a partner, to adapt your methods to the specific needs of the prospect and take work off their plate.

Signs you are talking too much about yourself

This one is hard to self-diagnose, because every claim feels relevant when you are the one making it. These are the tells:

• Your deck opens with your founding year. If slide one is about you, the buyer has already decided what kind of meeting this is.
• You could deliver the same pitch to any prospect. If nothing in it names their site, their sector or their known problems, it is a brochure read aloud.
• You are describing features rather than their outcomes. Officer screening is a feature. Fewer incidents they have to explain upward is an outcome.
• The prospect has said less than you have. Track it. If you spoke for most of a discovery call, you learned very little.
• Your differentiators are the same as everyone else’s. Experience, accountability and quality officers appear in every competing pitch, which is precisely why they differentiate nothing.

Too much information, not enough solutions

Technology and the information age have transformed the role of the salesperson. In the past, a salesperson could claim to add value for customers by serving as a valuable source of information about their specialized industry. Now, customers can find all that information online with relative ease, and the growth of online retail shows how much most people prefer that option to actually having to deal with a salesperson.

What this means is that a salesperson has to go beyond mere facts and figures to get into an in-depth discussion of the problems that the prospect faces and the specialized solutions that your company can deliver.

To do this, you have to do some preparation to understand the specifics of the prospect’s business. One of the most consistent pieces of feedback buyers give is that they are tired of the sheer number of questions they get asked by salespeople. Spend less time on needs analysis and more time on how you can address those needs, which means arriving with conclusions to test rather than a blank questionnaire.

A pre-call research checklist

Doing the homework is the part most people agree with and skip. It takes about twenty minutes per prospect, and it is the difference between a discovery call and an interrogation:

Notice that none of this requires the prospect to tell you anything. That is the point. Every row you fill in before the call is a question you no longer have to ask, and one more reason the meeting feels useful to them rather than to you.

Show, do not tell

The fastest way out of the salesperson stereotype is to stop making claims and start showing records. Every claim below is one a competitor will also make, and every replacement is something they probably cannot produce:

• Instead of “we have great officers”, show 90 days of tour completion from a comparable site, including the exceptions. A guard tour system produces that as a by-product of running the work.
• Instead of “we are responsive”, show your actual time from incident reported to acknowledged. A number beats an adjective, even when the number is imperfect.
• Instead of “we report monthly”, hand them last month’s real report from another client, with names removed. Business intelligence makes that a document you already have rather than one you build for the pitch.
• Instead of “we are accountable”, show an incident you surfaced yourselves and resolved before the client asked. Volunteering a miss buys more credibility than a perfect record nobody believes.
• Instead of “we know your sector”, show incident patterns from comparable properties. Structured incident reporting is what turns a year of reports into a sector insight.
• Instead of “you will always know what is happening”, open the guard app in the room and walk a checkpoint. A live demonstration ends the conversation faster than any slide.

This is also the honest answer to price pressure. When the only visible difference between two bidders is the rate, the rate decides, which is the whole argument for winning contracts without being the lowest bid.

Follow their timeline

Finally, once you’ve made your initial pitch and, hopefully, shown them enough to get them interested, work with the prospect to establish a timeline for following up and moving forward in the buying process.

Make sure to ask them what the next step is, don’t just decide on your own when to follow up. This again ensures that you’re presenting yourself as a partner and fitting in with their established processes. Now, if they do start to drag out the process, you can try to accelerate things by proposing some concrete steps, but otherwise stick to their timeline and present yourself as a valuable resource every step of the way.

If you want the wider picture of how these conversations turn into signed work, it is worth reading what security buyers actually evaluate. And if you would like to see the kind of operational record that makes “show, do not tell” possible, you can book a TrackTik demo and walk through it against your own sites.