Successful businesses know how to keep a steady stream of sales through prosperous economic times and the weak economic times that we’re experiencing right now as a nation. In either economic climate, it is critical that businesses maintain a solid sales strategy and avoid certain pitfalls during a sales approach.
In their article entitled “Five Common, Avoidable Sales Mistakes,” Bnet.com lists five traps that salespeople can fall into if they do not keep a consistent, customer focused approach:
- Mistake #1: Valuing new customers over existing ones. In most cases, the easiest sales are to existing, happy customers. However, many sales pros get so obsessed with feeding the pipeline that they neglect the easy sales that are just a phone call away.
- Mistake #2: Honoring numbers over relationships. Management may want you to focus on the numbers, but you’re much more likely to find it easy to make those numbers if you focus on building the kind of relationships that make selling easy.
- Mistake #3: Focusing on product rather than customer. This happens when sales pros have not thought through how their attitudes about selling drives their selling behaviors. If you get your head in the right place, you’ll focus on customers, and sales will increase.
- Mistake #4: Giving a generic presentation. What excites customers isn’t your canned list of features, but a presentation helps them to see (and feel) how the solution is directly tied to the problem that they need solved or the goal they need achieved.
- Mistake #5: Shooting from the hip. For many sales reps, planning seems like that would be better spent in customer-facing activities. Ironically, it’s only through planning that a sales rep can hope to become more productive and sell more effectively.
Source: Bnet.com
Readers of Bnet’s article have also added to this list, provided for you here:
- Mistake # 6: Not having a presence where the customers are looking.“With the growth of buyer centric marketplaces (like http://www.iFindConsultants.com), where buyers can post their requests and have vendors respond with tailored proposals, it’s important for sales teams to have a presence.”
- Mistake #7: Pitching what you have to offer without asking the customers what their needs are.“Goes back to listening and figuring how or you can help a specific customer or prospect right now. Maybe the best thing you can do at the moment is help connect your customer to the resource or support they are in the most in need of. ” -Karen Penfold
- Mistake #8: Being a jerk about how you present. “No one likes an arrogant bigmouth or a know-it-all. Instead, you want to communicate clearly, concisely and knowledgeably, but with some humility. Bear in mind that you may believe your product is the best, but it does not follow that everyone else’s product is junk. Just show the facts and advantages, then ask for the sale.” – dmrdano
- Mistake #9: Not understanding the power of social media (places like LinkedIn or Naymz as opposed to Facebook) people, companies and products get talked about, promoted and sold via these avenues. -Steve
Read full article here. Bnet.com
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