When most salespeople talk about calls gone bad they’re often talking about sales horror stories, a trend developed by Dan Seidman at Monster Sales News. I believe that any sales call that fails to move forward (next step, base or stage) is a bad call. When a prospect ‘didn’t hear anything that interested him’, one of two things happened:

Most companies experience losing important customers or clients at some point in time and statistics can certainly support a claim that you can’t keep every customer happy. But it’s that justification that usually hides the real problem, a problem that can duplicate itself again and again.

The interesting thing about this list is that most of the topics have little, if anything to do with closing. As a matter of fact, if a salesperson is effectively executing the process of selling, all of these topics are dealt with long before a salesperson determines that an opportunity is even closeable.

Today I was asked about the difference between sales training and sales development. They are the same except for one ENORMOUS difference. Sales training takes place in the classroom and is often difficult to apply and put into practice. Sales Development takes place throughout the sales organization from the top executives down through the most junior of salespeople. While sales training is a component of sales development, some of the components that are even more important include: