Even a lot of veteran salespeople have never encountered sales training that introduces them to the concept of Commitment Objectives. They’re often astonished when they discover how much money they have been leaving on the table because nobody ever explained it to them.
Tiffany Love, manager of sales training for veterinary health company Ceva, with U.S. headquarters near Kansas City, Kan., saw a case in point when she gave some Action Selling ®-based sales coaching to a veteran salesperson named Becky.
Becky was a new hire at Ceva, but she was not lacking in sales skills. “She had more than 15 years’ experience in sales, and she had been through tons of sales training that always talked about ‘call objectives,’” Love says.
Call objectives are not the same as Commitment Objectives. You can have any number of perfectly valid call objectives when you visit a customer: conduct a needs analysis, explore opportunities to get more of the customer’s business, ensure that the customer is happy with your service, and so on. But a Commitment Objective is a different animal.
Sales training and sales coaching based on Action Selling ® explain that a Commitment Objective refers to a specific, concrete action that you want the customer to agree to take as a result of any particular sales call. What do you want the customer to commit to DO by the end of this call that will move things forward to the next logical milestone in your sales process?
I believe that the Commitment Objective is the foundation stone that supports all meaningful sales skills. So crucial is it to be able to articulate a Commitment Objective for every single sales call you make that sales coaching based on Action Selling ® puts the rule like this: No Commitment Objective, no call.
