SKILL
Great Recoveries How Three Top Producers Learned Valuable Lessons
from Losing a Huge Sale HEATHER BALDWIN
Everyone makes mistakes. That old adage has been around since, well, forever – which is what makes it an old adage. But, when an error in judgment costs you a multimillion-dollar sale – or, worse, a multi- billion-dollar sale – it’s not so easy to shrug it off with a cliché. Yet shrugging it off, moving on, and incorporating the lessons into your sales strategy is one major key to long-term success. Here are three sales pros who failed spectacularly but used the lessons they learned as a springboard to close even bigger deals.
MANAGER #1 Sold aircraft engines for Rolls-Royce
The Sale: Based at the company’s 8 | FEBRUARY 2018 SELLING POWER
North American headquarters, Manager #1 was located just five miles from the corporate offices of a regional airline but had never set foot
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inside their door. They weren’t in his territory. In fact, they weren’t in any Rolls-Royce rep’s territory because they used GE engines on their fleet of regional jets.
Admitting it would be costly to switch airplane and engine suppliers, Rolls-Royce management assumed any planes with GE engines would be loath to switch suppliers. Further, since Rolls-Royce was reducing sales and marketing costs at the time, they trimmed relationship building efforts with seemingly long-shot customers. So, when a request for proposal (RFP) for new regional jets and engines arrived at Rolls-Royce’s HQ office one day, the engine maker was stunned. “We were caught flat-footed,” admits Manager #1. “The company quickly looked around for someone to handle the sale and found me, but I didn’t have a relationship with the regional airline.” So he tried to compress years of re- lationship building into a few months, but, even with a solid proposal, it wasn’t enough. The sale – a $30+ million order – went to incumbent engine maker GE. The Lesson: In sales, relationships
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