10 Reasons Why Salespeople Hallucinate

Posted by Dave Kurlan 

I was in the basement of our home looking for something when I saw it.  It moved left to right, low, between the stored Christmas trees.  I took another look and this time it moved right to left.  Each time I moved, it moved.  I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized it wasn't a critter but a shadow that I was casting.

I saw something that simply wasn't there.  A figment of my imagination.  You could even call it a hallucination.

Salespeople frequently have hallucinations where they think there is something there, like a great opportunity, and in reality, there isn't anything there.  Not even close.  And then there are the salespeople who don't see an opportunity when there is actually a great one hiding in plain site.

Let's talk about the many reasons that these scenarios occur.

Let's start with my top 10 reasons why salespeople hallucinate an opportunity where there is none:

1. The prospect seemed to like them and was open
2. The salesperson did so much talking that they failed to identify whether or not there was a compelling reason to buy
3. The prospect didn't voice an objection so the salesperson assumed that they were a go
4. The salesperson failed to differentiate but assumed they were effective
5. The salesperson failed to thoroughly qualify and assumed that it was all systems go
6. The sales manager did not inspect the opportunity or coach to the opportunity after it was updated in CRM
7. The prospect was not comfortable sharing and the salesperson was not comfortable challenging that
8. The prospect asked for a quote or proposal and the salesperson took that as a buying signal and went into facilitation mode
9. The salesperson began with a demo and the prospect, who was not the decision maker, thought it was nice to have but not a must have
10. The salesperson assessed all of the competition, the size of the company, how hard it would be to get the business and decided for the customer that it wasn't worth pursuing.

 If you or your salespeople are guilty of one or more of these selling sins, it's time to take professional selling more seriously.  Salespeople are hired and well paid to have sometimes difficult discovery conversations with sometimes difficult prospects.  Those who retreat to the office to quote are behaving like minimum wage facilitators.  Facilitating is easy while selling is challenging so do your job, push through the uncomfortable stuff and differentiate!