Have you heard about the brand-new mobile jobber who was visiting their assigned customer accounts for the first time? The new mobile jobber was all fired up and excited to get selling. They had the perfect positive mental attitude.
They were making these calls with their district manager (DM) who was well aware of and had an opinion about all the customers in this particular area.
As they made their sales calls on that first field day the DM would help the new mobile jobber prepare for each call with samples, literature, an opinion of each facility, and sometimes a comment or two about the individuals in that shop.
The opinions ranged from, “This is a great shop with lots of good customers,” or unfortunately, “This shop has a negative vibe going on, and we’ve never done well here.” And some pre-call opinions were really negative like, “This shop has nothing but deadbeats and payment skippers, so let’s be careful who we sell to here.”
In reality, this DM has set pre-call expectations in the new mobile’s mind before they even walked in the door. This is beyond terrible sales training and hopefully, this DM will not be in their position long. The DM effectively killed off the new mobile’s positive mental attitude little by little with every negative customer review.
Prequalifying a sales call whether positively or negatively is setting yourself up for failure in so many ways.
