In life we have many opportunities that are placed before us and we have to choose how to react to each of these opportunities. We make these decisions based on many facts. Sometimes we make the best decision and sometimes we make the worst decision; most of the time we fall right in the middle. Those that excel in our area of expertise, make the right/better decision more often than not. Sales professionals have numerous opportunities each and every day for new and repeat business and those that shine over time are those that make the better decisions.

Why do they make the better decisions more often?

• Top performers are smarter, more privileged, or just down right lucky. Some of them are more educated.
• They are more experienced.
• They make better use of the tools and connection that they have.
• What do you think causes people to make better decisions? (Write a comment to this blog.)

Well, for one thing, it can be they are good decision makers for any of the above reasons. For most people it is making better use of the tools and connections that they have. Not being shy or too good and asking their peers and advisors for advice on issues. Doing some old-fashioned research or using Google and other search tools that can be easily accessed from most computers. These take much less time than going to the library and having to order information to be mailed to you. Make good use of your company's own system and collected information on the client or prospect. For example, this email from a salesperson to an existing client:

Xxxxx,

I’m Xxxxxxx, your iland Internet Solutions Sales Director. I wanted to discuss your existing colocated environment and see if you might be interested in discussing some of our other strategic offerings. Have you considered a cloud infrastructure environment?

For clients who make the move to our highly scalable, redundant and cost-effective virtual environment, we’ve been able to save them an average of $15-20k annually.

I will follow up with you in the next few days with a phone call if your schedule permits to talk more about the possibility of utilizing iland’s cloud for production, test and development or back-up and disaster recovery. Just let me know what your calendar looks like and I will set something up.

Thanks so much for your time and attention. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.

Sincerely,

This may look like a reasonable sales letter. In fact, the sales director failed to do any research on the existing client that she was contacting, and did not even look to see what the client billed through them and can they even save them money. The particular client that this was sent to bills less then $2k per year with the company, their total yearly expense for these types of services is under $4k per year, so how are they going to save 4-5 times that amount?

The person that received this email was doing research for another client of theirs, on different clouds for them to use, so you would think that this email was timely. Sending a bulk blind email to an already unhappy client, with the blatant disregard to their business of failing to take the little time to look up the client and check their records to see if the email is on point, has now caused the sender's company to be taken out of consideration for a larger piece of business, and you bet the recipient will tell many people about how the company does not even care about their clients. Something that if a little homework was done could have turned into a big win for the sales director is, instead,ending up hurting their and their company's bottom line.

This is an example of a sales rep that is probably one of the top performers, might be smarter, better educated, more experienced, privileged, or just down right lucky. They failed to make any use of the tools before them and think about how many people this message went to that just deleted it because it had information that was not appropriate for their situation. The individuals that got this or a similar message from the same company will not look at other services that this company has to offer, and you can damn well bet they will not be recommending them to anyone. It would have been no issue just to pull up their contracted services or look up how much they are billed them per month or per year. If the recipient could save even the low number $15k per year, they should be getting free hosting for ever. Lack of research and thought on how the recipient would interpret the email has caused the bad decision to be made.