Your Sellers Are Needy And It’s Not A Good Look
- Dan Greenberg
- Mar 18
- 6 min read
I once had the opportunity to work with a guy named Rob. Well, I didn’t really work with him so much as watch him dance circles around me and the entire rest of our sales team. He wasn’t naturally charming or handsome, and he wasn’t particularly intelligent or a force of will when he walked into a room. Additionally, his clients didn’t really like him all that much. I mean, most of them didn’t dislike him, but he wasn’t out to make friends, and it was clear that people weren’t buying from him because they wanted to hang out with him more.
There was nothing that you could pinpoint about him that was a traditional trait or behavior of a great seller, but he constantly won. He constantly made deals happen. There was nothing flashy or interesting about the deals he won, he just won a lot of them and he was consistent. What was it about Rob that made this happen? Or, should I say, what was it about Rob that drove these outcomes over and over again? I’ll tell you the answer that I came to understand from watching him interact with clients, and I’ll preface it by telling you that after I developed this understanding of what he was doing, I heard Rob describe his success a few different times to different groups and he identified the same key driver and talked about it in the same way. So, what was it?
Rob did not need your business. It was very clear to every one of Rob’s prospects and clients that if he did not get their business, he would not be bothered in the slightest, and he would turn around and get business from someone else.
The questions that remain are, why is this core principle so powerful? And, how did he pull it off?
Let’s start with the why. Why is lack of neediness so important:
Generosity: It is part of our human nature to be generous, but in order to be generous, we have developed defense mechanisms that guard us from giving away all of our money and time to others. Those who display neediness are signaling to us that they want to take from the relationship without giving as much, and that becomes a subconscious signal to us that we should not have charitable feelings towards being in a relationship with that person.
Social Proof: One of the most prominent heuristics we use when deciding who to work with is social proof. If we see someone who is needy, we assume that others are not working with them, and we instinctively think that it may not be a good idea for us to work with them. The slightest bit of neediness shown by a seller, can lead to clients subconsciously heading for the hills.
Bad Decisions: Needy sellers can easily be blinded by their desire to close a deal, and often make bad and shortsighted decisions that lead to a lower likelihood of a close. Simply put, the seller’s incentives don’t line up with the buyer’s incentives because of the sellers poor decisions, and that makes it much harder for the seller to resonate with the buyer, and therefore much less likely for the buyer to want to stick around.
Now, let’s discuss how Rob pulled it off:
Professionalism: In my time observing Rob, he was always cordial, polite, and even jovial with his clients. It is not that they didn’t want to be around him, it was just that they didn’t want to be friends outside of the work environment. He was professional, and constructive, but never overly-complimentary or subservient in any way.
Matter of fact: Clients always knew where they stood with Rob because he was always telling them about his other clients. They knew he was busy and they knew that the second they didn’t comply with the sales process as it was mutually laid out Rob would move on to another client without giving it a second thought because he had others and they were not special. He never made it a point to tell them they weren’t special, but he did make it clear that they were a priority and he had other priorities as well.
Challenging and pushing back: Rob really did have a full pipeline consistently. He worked very hard to keep it that way, and he often told clients that right now was not the right time to make a deal, either because he didn’t have time or because he didn’t think it was the right time for them. Some of those clients asked to make deals right away, but many stayed in touch and made deals down the road. He was able to do this because he legitimately could move on to other clients and come back to the original ones later.
Here is the thing about Rob that is important to wrap your mind around if you are a revenue leader. There just aren’t that many Robs out there. It is a sliding scale and there are people across different parts of the scale, but in my experience about one out of every 20 experienced sellers works in a similar way to Rob. Even if your are great at hiring and incredibly patient, you won’t be able to wait around long enough and make enough good decisions to hire only Robs.
This means that somewhere around 19 out of every 20 of your sellers are not going to do the things they need to do to produce this way. They are not going to develop a big enough pipeline to feel truly like they are not in need. They are not going to harness the skills and behaviors to be able to tell clients what needs to be said in order to drive the right actions, and they are not going to develop the chutzpah to challenge clients and converse in the blunt and straightforward way that they need to. In short, they will act needy. Not all the time, but sometimes, and that is enough. It’s enough to diminish results and it is enough to put you in a position where your sellers are not performing at the level you want.
So, why is this something that leaders need to know and not the sellers themselves? Of course, the sellers do need to know it, but the number one tool in the toolkit that can make sellers feel less needy is their pipeline and they need your help to fill it. Organizations and revenue leaders need to put sellers in a position where they do not need any of their prospects or clients. You, as a leader, need to put your sellers in a position where they have so many leads and such a big pipeline that they are overwhelmed and they naturally start to act as if they don’t care about any one deal more than the others. And, you need to do it now.
Every client or prospect that a needy seller talks to is a client or prospect that is no more likely to close as a win for you than to close as a win for any other competitor with slightly needy sellers. The sooner your sellers have a great pipeline, the sooner they will start to behave like they do, and the sooner they will start closing at a higher rate.
You need to do it by using AI tools, sales development reps, marketing, and operational support to drive more leads than your sellers know what to do with. You can’t ask the sellers to do it themselves, or expect them to do it on their own. You and your organization need to make it happen, and here is why:
When your sellers are needy, they are less likely to make a deal. I mentioned the three most vivid reasons above, but to sum up, if your sellers are worried that they don’t have a large enough pipeline, they will become overly focused on the possible deals they are working on at any given moment causing them to come off as needy and causing them to make poor decisions.
Your sellers will burn out if you ask too much of them. Asking your sellers to be researchers, marketing content creators, sales enablers, prospectors, relationship managers, deal makers, negotiators, account managers, and a host of other types of operators as things come up is a tall order. Task switching is hard, and sellers default to doing what they are comfortable with, and if pushed to do the things they aren’t comfortable with, they will eventually burn out. So give them support that helps build their pipeline so they can focus on selling.
Your sellers are not good at everything. If you hire a great relationship manager and then ask them to become a researcher, they are likely to not be the most qualified person for both tasks. It is not an ideal use of resources to ask people you hired because they were good at one thing, to do something completely different.
If you are paying your sellers to sell, you don’t want them doing other tasks. Specialization is business dogma, yet we ask our sellers to perform a laundry list of functional roles, some are mentioned above in #2. No one is good at all of those tasks. You pay your sellers to build relationships and close deals, so it is smart business to support them with people and tools that help them spend as much time as possible doing the things you are paying them to do.
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