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If you
could boil down every mistake that is killing your golf game to five essential
things, you’d pay a lot of money, wouldn’t you? What if you could identify and solve the
five biggest errors people make in their daily diets? That would be worth a lot of money too,
wouldn’t it? Let’s
take a look at something that is just as valuable…the five critical errors that
most salespeople make – and how to determine if you commit them in your own
career. This one takes a dead bead
on the most critical errors with loser like accuracy. These
results I’ll be sharing with you are a result of over 20 years of active
research, 25 years of selling and a consequence of personally training literally
tens of thousands of salespeople.
Are you ready? Here we go. 1. Failure
to maintain a constant presence in the minds of prospects or
customers.
Quite
simply, this is a failure to prospect consistently both outside and inside of
existing accounts. 2. Me too
thinking.
Salespeople
fail to be creative and innovative. As a consequence, they don’t differentiate
themselves, their products or their organization from everyone else in the
pack. 3. Failure
to listen.
This
is, perhaps, the most classic and common error. The salesperson that hears but
doesn’t listen. The salesperson that interrupts prospects, delivers solutions
that are off-target, or simply overwhelms prospects and customers with verbiage
that clearly communicates a failure to have really listened to anything the
other person has said. 4. Failure
to anticipate.
A
failure to foresee problems in an account. Missing trends, potential problems,
needs or necessary solutions that could forestall problems or head off the loss
of accounts. 5. A
tendency to focus on process over results.
The
consequence of this is a poorly executed system of prioritization that virtually
cripples the salesperson from delivering effective, bottom line results. In
short, they are focused on activities rather than results. As a consequence they
believe they’re busy (and they are). They are just busy doing all of the wrong
things! Identifying
the problems is one thing. Solving them is, often, quite another. The good news?
Awareness is a lot more than 50% of the battle. Are you suffering from some of
these maladies? Let’s take a look at a simple quiz that could yield some
valuable information for you. 1. Do you
feel that your prospects or customers are driving hard on price? 2. Do
your customers ever buy products or services from other suppliers that you could
have provided them? 3. Do you
find you have to revise or redo proposals for prospects? 4. Have
you had prospects reschedule important meetings with you? 5. Do
your prospects submit requests for proposals that you hear about at the last
minute? 6. Do you
ever miss out on additional requests from customers? 7. Have
you missed your sales forecasts for at least 2 of the last 4 quotas? 8. Do you
feel that your customers or prospects are looking for deeper, better solutions
than what you have been providing them? 9.
Do you
feel your prospects or customers get frustrated by errors? 10.Do
you find prospects failing to involve you in their future plans? Any
“yes” answer means you may have a problem! You then need to go about the
business of resolving them to the very best of your ability. Recognition and awareness are essential components to start your success journey. |
