Sales numbers are a lot like batting averages. If everyone gets an extra hit here and there, suddenly you’ve got an unbeatable team. Unfortunately, the opposite also holds true. A few less hits across the board and you’re in the basement. Sales reluctance can cost you those hits, so before your sales tank because reps are making fewer calls, take a hard look at the reality of sales reluctance. Better to head off a problem in the making than suffer the consequences of a problem making its way through your sales team.

By most accounts, reluctance has a pervasive impact on salespeople and their performance. Betty Maes, vice president of training for Kansas City-headquartered Commerce Bank and its 350 branches, says without hesitation, “At least 95 percent of our people have some form of reluctance.” Michele Carroll, senior vice president of membership and sales for Dallas-based ClubCorp, USA, which owns and manages an impressive portfolio of private clubs and resorts including Pinehurst and Indian Wells Country Club, says that of her company’s 350 employees with sales responsibilities, “85 or 90 percent have some form of reluctance.”

These percentages jibe with the findings of George Dudley, founder of Behavioral Sciences Research Press and co-author of The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance. He has studied one category of sales reluctance – reluctance as it applies to the initial customer contact – for two decades. Dudley finds that approximately 90 percent of salespeople suffer from reluctance. He calculates that 50 percent of salespeople have toxic reluctance issues that require immediate attention; another 40 percent have chronic low-level reluctance that affects their performance but does not overwhelm it.

Sales reluctance is obviously a major performance issue. Worse, only 2 to 4 percent of sales managers know what it is, how to diagnose it and how to treat it. But there is some good news: most sales reluctance – up to 95 percent of it – can be cured on the job.

Defining Sales Reluctance

Dudley defines sales reluctance as “all the thoughts, feelings and behavioral patterns that conspire to limit what a salesperson is able to do to move closer to his or her goals.” So reluctance is an internal, often emotional, barrier that stands in the way of sales success.

“What is happening with reluctant salespeople is that they would like to do their jobs, but they find themselves unable to,” says Dr. Jeff Tanner, who teaches in the nation’s first professional-selling degree program at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business. “So they cope with it in various ways. They do other tasks.”

It is sometimes difficult to get a handle on reluctance, because it can manifest in many ways. “I don’t think there is a single psychology behind a reluctant performer, says Tanner. “I think there are different situations and different combinations of situations.” In his study of call reluctance, Dudley has identified 12 (see sidebar).

Further, reluctance can appear anytime during a sales career. When good salespeople burn out, for example, it is often because the pressure of compensating for their reluctance has become too high. Reluctance can also manifest itself anywhere in the sales process – in the initial call, presentation, closing, etc.

One thing that is clear is that reluctance is not a function of a salesperson’s motivation, goals or skills. Salespeople who are not motivated to succeed and who do not have the proper goals and skill sets are not, by definition, reluctant.

Because this distinction is not widely recognized, sales reluctance is something of an iceberg to many sales managers. When faced with it, they see only its tip, in the form of the salesperson’s performance shortfall, and misdiagnose it as a skills gap or a lack of motivation. They respond with training programs, exercises and motivational speakers aimed at performance improvement. But these solutions don’t address the emotional problems floating beneath the surface, and when they don’t work, managers are left with two choices: either accept poor results or give up on the salesperson. Of course, neither option is cost-effective.

Diagnosing Reluctance

Here’s a simple rule set for deciding whether or not a salesperson is reluctant: Salespeople who don’t want to sell have motivation problems. Salespeople who don’t know how to sell have skills problems. Salespeople who want to sell and know how to sell, but just can’t bring themselves to take the required action, are likely suffering from reluctance problems. When you find salespeople who “just can’t,” you must diagnose exactly what it is they can’t do.

If you are dealing with a salesperson with a variety of problems, his reluctance may be related to a negative image of selling as a career. “I had a student who got a wonderful job with a commercial insurance company, and he quit before he even started,” remembers Baylor’s Tanner. “The particular psychology that was happening was role rejection, where people aren’t willing to accept the role of salesperson. They see it as all the bad adjectives and descriptors, and even though they may be good at it and have a lot of natural ability, they are not able to do the job.” When a role rejecter keeps the job, you can expect to see many performance issues.

Reluctance can also stem from a negative self-image. For example, many business-to-business solution salespeople encounter difficulties when they attempt to sell to senior executives. “It’s called social self-consciousness,” explains Jenifer Lambert, vice president of business development for Seattle-based professional recruiting firm Terra Resource Group. “That is the belief that anyone they perceive to be up-market from them – whether that person is more educated, in a higher position, or more wealthy – is somehow special. I have recruiters who are very comfortable presenting to an HR manager, but then it comes time to present to the vice president level and they freeze.”

Dave Stein, founder of The Stein Advantage, a Mahopac, New York-based consultancy and training firm, and author of How Winners Sell, has witnessed the phenomenon during his client engagements. “I realized that the salespeople felt uncomfortable in meetings with CEOs. They knew that when they got the appointment they would somehow get themselves in a situation that they didn’t want to be in, that was either uncomfortable or embarrassing or worse. So they became reluctant to make contact.”

In many cases, managers can pinpoint reluctance by following the salesperson’s progress through the sale. Poor closing ratios, for example, are indicative of a “yielder.” Cindy Reynolds, a veteran sales executive who is currently a consultant to Mission, Kansas-based Packaging Products Corporation, remembers a salesman who was unable to close: “He had an inability to push the client. He could initiate the contact and do all of these great things, but when it came time to nailing the sale, he was very hesitant. And because he couldn’t do that, he was working very hard at prospecting, but he wasn’t nailing the deals.”

A salesperson who is always working but never in front of customers may be an “over-preparer.” Commerce Bank’s Betty Maes says, ”We’ve had individuals within the bank who prepared books on each customer. Their files were beautiful and they were all up-to-date. But they spent so much energy putting together these perfect files that they never went out on the call.”

Likewise, salespeople with sub-par contact numbers may well have telephobia. Those who avoid speaking to groups may suffer from stage fright. Those who can’t produce referrals may be fearful of irritating a current client and losing their business. The job of diagnosing reluctance issues is aimed at identifying how these issues are being manifested in the salesperson’s performance.

Curing Sales Reluctance

It should go without saying that sales managers are not psychiatrists. The result managers are seeking is not a perfectly adjusted human, but a successful sales professional. So, successfully curing sales reluctance is more about curing the symptoms of a disease than it is about curing its root cause. This is a good thing, because trying to change long-established neural patterns can often a become long-term, no-win proposition. Says Tony Rutigliano, co-author of Discover Your Sales Strengths and chief learning officer at Roseland, New Jersey-based Automatic Data Processing (ADP) Inc., “If it’s a wiring issue, you have to say, ‘I can’t change that. Even though I am the greatest sales manager on earth, I can’t rewire somebody’s brain.’”

Instead, the first key to curing most cases of reluctance lies in helping salespeople recognize their counterproductive behaviors. “Most people in sales have spent their careers pretending to be unafraid,” explains Terra Resource’s Jenifer Lambert. “So they suppress it and deny it. And they either fail or they just have so much anxiety they deal with on a daily basis that it saps energy they could be putting into more productive pursuits. But once you put it out on the table, you can say, ‘Look, here are the issues,’ and then, you introduce salespeople to countermeasures they can use to prevent or to stop that fear when it starts. It’s incredibly powerful.”

Interestingly, the insight into the causes of their reluctance is sometimes enough to jog salespeople back on track. “When this great body of science says, ‘This is very common and oh, by the way, you are not a freak, because you are not the only person who suffers from this,’ that alone is about enough to cure half the people,” says Cindy Reynolds. “They are just so thrilled that it’s not just them.”

The second key to curing reluctance is often just a simple countermeasure. For example, one Terra Resource recruiter who suffered from social self-consciousness came up with this solution to her problem: “She wouldn’t put the title of the person she was calling in her contact management software,” says Jenifer Lambert, “because if it was a high-level title, it would cause her to become reluctant.”

A practical exercise can go long way. Eric Stromquist, who leads the sales effort at Stromquist & Co., a family-owned HVACR distributorship in Smyrna, GA, helps reluctant salespeople overcome their fear of closing by sending them out to sell pens. The mission: to introduce themselves to random people on the street and simply ask them to buy a pen – nothing more, nothing less. “We strip the sale down to that moment,” Stromquist explains. “We get them comfortable with that moment. We get them to the point where they can walk up to anybody, anytime, any place, completely unafraid and just say, ‘Hey, I request you buy this pen now.’ The answer doesn’t matter.”

Role-playing works, too. “We have had great success working with telephobics,” says Michele Carroll of ClubCorp. “You start role-playing with them. You sit them down and show that they can be very successful. We work with them in a very safe environment first, with peers or people they know, and then we graduate them.”

A positive atmosphere is critical to all these efforts. As Tony Rutigliano says, “We have to pay attention to the strengths of the person rather than their weaknesses. Let’s say I was struggling with shyness. What I have seen great managers do is say, ‘Tony, I understand that you are shy, but once the ice is broken I have noticed that you really warm up to people and they warm up to you. So why don’t we come up with three things that you can say that will break the ice.’ A great manager is one who really identifies the strength that can help me overcome a shortcoming or gives me some kind of mechanism, a crutch if you will, to help that weakness become less important.”

Still, the final note has to be one of caution: Not every reluctant salesperson can be salvaged, so set a time limit on the cure. George Dudley calculates that 5 percent of reluctant performers have problems that cannot be addressed without professional therapy. Further, there are always some combinations of problems that are too time-consuming to solve. When the time runs out, smart managers cut their losses.