The Complete Fool’s Guide to Sales Failure

Ever wonder what sales mistakes you shouldn’t make?

I mean, have you thought about it really hard?

Everyone makes mistakes. There aren’t too many salespeople out there who do everything right.

If you want to notice traits in others (or maybe yourself) that lead to sales failure, look for this:

1. Not Making Your Activity Count

Yes, you may call a hundred, or even several hundred, contacts in one day. If you do this, you definitely have a strong commitment to being a top sales person.

That’s good.

But, if you don’t qualify those prospects or understand where they are in the sales cycle, you’re missing out on a large piece of the sales success. It’s time for some coaching with your manager.

2. You Don’t Follow Your Prospecting Plan

Many sales people fall into this trap.

But isn’t prospect marketing’s responsibility?

Really, prospecting is everyone’s job, starting from your executive leadership and running down to your lowest-ranking employee.

If you don’t have a prospecting plan (even a personal one if your sales department doesn’t have one), it’s time to make one.

3. No Sense of Urgency

Can’t you just do what you need to do for the next several months, and maybe the year?

You can, but you throw your sales career to the wind when you do that.

You must have a proactive plan in place for meeting tightly-defined goals.

Otherwise, you keep spinning your wheels and going nowhere. Or worse, you go backwards and fail completely.

4. You Don’t Use a Consistent Sales Process

The trouble this gets you into is you keep changing to meet your client’s needs.

Sounds good at first, doesn’t it?

It’s actually a recipe for failure because when you constantly change, you miss out on the opportunity to land bigger clients ready to pay more.

You get inconsistent results.

The best salespeople have a narrow sales process they use to land the best clients.

5. You Attempt to Persuade & Convince

Today’s prospects dislike this strongly. In fact, it’s one of the fastest ways to turn them off.

Those tactics were in use and were very popular – decades ago.

Now, it works much better if you diagnose a customer problem and work with the prospect to solve it.

6. You Spend Too Much Time Building Rapport

A small amount of rapport is a good thing. If you take it too far, though, it comes across as you trying to get the prospect to like you (and they don’t like that).

It’s far more important for prospects to trust and respect you. And again, you do that by asking questions so you fully understand their problem.

If you make those mistakes consistently, you’re well on your way to failing in sales. But if you identify those patterns and make changes, you’ll find yourself quickly climbing the sales success ladder.