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Are You One of Those Coaches Who Engage in Overkill?

Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith

Article Overview: Are you a sales coach, business coach or a small business owner who is experiencing some less than stellar sales results? Possibly, you may be engaging in overkill and thus hurting your own opportunities to increase sales?

Are You One of Those Coaches Who Engage in Overkill?

Many business coaches to sales coaches work with small business owners because there are more of these target markets (flies) than the multi million to multi billion dollar organizations (elephants). In attempting to secure this target market, these same coaches appear to use the elephant gun as the weapon of choice even though they are hunting flies.

When examining the backgrounds of these coaches, many of them come from corporate backgrounds and have been conditioned to sales based marketing where overkill is one of the primary selling strategies. The focus is selling the product or service first and foremost with the client's actual needs coming in second.

Now using the elephant gun, these well meaning business coaches, sales coaches and even some executive coaches create these results:

Waste of time
Waste of energy
Waste of money
Waste of emotions
Longer sales cycle times
Higher client acquisition costs

The behaviors of these coaches as demonstrated through their sales skills who use the elephant gun approach include the following:

Always talking
Not actively listening to the potential buyers
Putting down other coaches because their solutions are obviously better
Providing solutions that are way too big, too expensive and do not meet the needs of the customer

Simple common sense would suggest that to hunt a fly, one should use a fly swatter (using the same analogy). Of course, if you really understood the fly, you would probably use honey or some other food that would attract the fly.

In sales, the sales skills of choice should be education based marketing. This is probably more like honey because you are attracting the potential customer (a.k.a. prospect) or potential qualified customer (qualified prospect).

The results from this new approach can be:

Maximization of the resources of time, energy, money and emotions
Shorter sales cycle time
Higher conversion rates
Reduced client acquisition costs
Increased credibility within the marketplace

The time has passed to use elephant guns to increase sales. Now is the time to change your sales skills to work with the current market conditions unless you want to be left at the back of the very crowded marketplace.

Related Articles
  Life Coach Business
  Why the Movement to License Business Coaches to Executive Coaches
  Service Professionals Can Increase Sales By Swapping the Elephant Gun for the Fly Swatter
  Is Your Weapon of Choice an Elephant Gun or a Fly Swatter to Increase Sales?
  The Case for Coaching Supervision by Anne Pink

Article Tags: acquisition costs, business coaches, client acquisition, conversion rates, corporate backgrounds, dollar organizations, elephant gun, energy waste, executive coaches, fly swatter, selling strategies, shorter sales, small business owners, target market, target markets, time energy, time waste, waste of energy, waste of money, weapon of choice



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