I just spent an entire week working with a sales team facing increasing competition and suffering from a less than stellar closing ratio. They were having difficulty differentiating themselves despite their position as the market leader.

My brother-in-law was asking me about how difficult it is to train salespeople on the execution of Baseline Selling compared with other selling methodologies.

Last week I provided examples of the kinds of questions you need to ask on the way to 2nd Base. I also invited readers to send me their questions and I would let you know if you got them right. I still have a number of emails to respond to but will share this reader’s questions because they were so good.

Reverse Selling was conceptualized by Elmer Wheeler in the 1930’s and 1940’s. If you have read Baseline Selling then you may remember that Elmer is the guy who coined the phrase, “sell the sizzle, not the steak”.

What constitutes a good sales call?

I hear salespeople tell me, “it went well!” When I ask why they think so, I hear things like, “we had a great conversation”, “we hit it off”, “they’re going to spend a lot of money”, “they loved what I said”, etc.

I accompanied Bob and George on a sales call yesterday and mostly sat and observed. Not much happened, there weren’t any obvious compelling reasons for the prospect to do anything and the call seemed to be a waste of their time. I jumped in twice, the first time to rattle off some issues that I had heard but which weren’t addressed. That moved the call a little bit in the right direction, but not enough.

There is a huge difference between having a good conversation or having a good sales call with a prospect. Let’s assume that we’re face to face with a prospect and it’s the first meeting. We’ve started the meeting on first base and we want to advance, at minimum, to second base.

The Lexus salesperson (I’ll call him Fred) called Thursday and made his annual trade-in offer. I took advantage of it last December but this year he called to see if my wife would like to trade her 2005 GX470 for the brand new 2008 GX470 for the same monthly payment.