The Worst Kind of Friction

Friction is the enemy in the sales process. Scott Miller, CEO of Randall Reilly, lists “Reducing Friction” as one of his five core practices for a winning team. Friction can be defined as unnecessary impediments or barriers to a smooth and easy business process. In business development and sales, we focus on reducing the client or customer’s experience of friction.

For instance, at one time, we would send our contracts for signature as PDFs. This required our clients to print them out, sign them, scan them, and send them back. PDF software meant they could sign it digitally, but we never knew whether they had that software or not. Multiple steps, too much friction. Then we upgraded to DocuSign, and they receive a web-based form, click a few boxes and we’re off to the races. Friction reduced.

Another example is scheduling. I always send a scheduling link in my prospecting emails with the promise that if the recipient would rather we set up a time the old-fashioned way, our client services rep is ready to do that. Appointments drop on my calendar this way–we’ve eliminated the back-and-forth. The meeting is calendered, we are done! 

It’s always a good idea to evaluate how you can reduce friction for your clients–how can you make it easy to do business with you? As sales trainers, we find there is another kind of friction. It's even worse than expecting clients to print PDFs or play scheduling tag. It’s the friction producers experience between their ears.

The Friction Between Your Ears

What is the force that ALWAYS slows down sales momentum, that consistently insulates a producer from market reality, that blocks one from achieving their revenue generation goals? Friction in the mind. It is in the mind that we tell ourselves friction-producing mantras like the following:

“They will never take my call.”

“I don’t know enough about our product or service.”

“Someone else on our team might be covering them so I’d better let it go.”

“They haven’t responded to my email because they don’t like me.”

“I don’t want to do too much outreach because I could end up with more leads than I can handle.”

“We have a personal relationship therefore this person will be offended if I raise a business opportunity.”

Phrases like these are ways we say no for our prospects AND slow down our internal process.  Slowing down internally means we burn lots of brain cycles wondering what we should do instead of getting our asks out there and giving the market a chance to give us feedback. And as RKE Sales Expert, Ka Cotter says, “time kills deals.” Too much time gone by, and too slow a pace, leads to low production.  

It’s much better to let the prospect say no (or “maybe later” or even better, “yes”) than it is to entertain hours of mental gymnastics debating what you should do.  

As you consider your revenue goals, how would you assess the level of friction between your ears? What can you do to minimize its impact on your revenue production?

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As an executive training solutions provider, RKE Partners offers sales accelerator engagements and focused coaching for all levels of revenue generators. Contact us today to explore how our team can help you sell more confidently and joyfully.