Over the decades that I’ve been involved in sales, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of salespeople. Certain negative tendencies — mistakes that salespeople make — keep surfacing. Here’s numbers two and three, not necessarily in order of priority. See to what degree you (or your sales force) may be guilty of them.

#2 Mistake: Lack of Planning

The typical field salesperson has, as a necessary and integral part of his or her personality, an inclination toward action. We like to be busy — driving here and there, talking on our cell phones, putting deals together, solving customers’ problems — all in a continuous flurry of activity. Boy, can we get stuff done!

And this high-energy inclination to action is a powerful personality strength, energizing the salesperson who wants to achieve success.

But, like every powerful personality trait, this one has a dark side. Our inclination to act often overwhelms our wiser approach to think before we act.

In our hunger for action, we neglect to take a few moments to think about that action. Is this the most effective place to go? Have I thoroughly prepared for this sales call? Do I know what I want to achieve in this call? Is this the person I should be seeing, or is there someone else who is more appropriate? Is it really wise to drive 30 miles to see this account, and then backtrack 45 miles to see another?

Customers these days are demanding salespeople who are thoroughly prepared, who have well-thought-out agendas, and who have done their research before the sales call. All of this works to the detriment of the “ready-shoot-aim” type of salesperson.

On the other hand, those who discipline themselves to a regular routine of dedicated time devoted to planning and preparing will find themselves far more effective than their action-oriented colleagues.

Overcoming the Tendency of Not Planning

Unfortunately, it almost always takes hard work and discipline to overcome a bad habit that is easy for us to create. That is true of this tendency. The habit of thoughtless action is easy to create because our basic personalities so easily gravitate toward action.

To change it, we need to use discipline to create the habit of thoughtful planning. I’d suggest that you build dedicated planning time into your schedule. During this time, you plan and prepare (in other words, you think about it before you do it). Here’s the schedule of thinking time that I recommend:

• An annual planning retreat of one to three days.
• A monthly planning time in which you create a specific plan for that month.
• A weekly time to plan and prepare for the coming week.
• A daily planning time at the end of every day to prepare for the next.
• A two-minute thought-time before every sales call to focus and ground yourself in the objectives and strategies for that call.

All of this sounds like a lot, and it is. My rule for years has been to spend 20 percent of my time planning and preparing (thinking about) the other 80 percent of my time. The discipline of thinking about it before you do it will make you much more effective in the 80 percent that is dedicated to actually doing it.

#3 Mistake: Contentment With the Superficial

Here is number three of my top five. See to what degree you (or your sales force) may be guilty of it.

There are some customers whom you have called on for years, and yet the salesperson doesn’t know any more about them today than he or she did after the second sales call. These are accounts where the salesperson cannot identify one of the account’s customers, explain whether or not they are profitable, or identify one of their strategic goals.

Most salespeople have a wonderful opportunity to learn about their customers in deeper and more detailed ways and often squander it by having the same conversations with the same customers over and over. They never dig deeper. They mistake familiarity with knowledge.

What a shame. I am convinced that the ultimate sales skill — the one portion of the sales process that, more than anything else, determines our success as a salesperson — is the ability to know the customers deeper and in a more detailed way than our competitors know them.

It’s our knowledge of the customer that allows us to position ourselves as competent, trustworthy consultants.

It’s our knowledge of the customer that provides us the information we need to structure programs and proposals that distinguish us from everyone else.

And it’s our knowledge of the customer that allows us to proactively serve that customer, to meet their needs even before they have articulated them.

In an economic environment where the distinctions between companies and products are blurring in the eyes of the customer, the successful companies and individuals will be those who outsell the rest. And outselling the rest depends on understanding the customer better than anyone else.

Overcoming the Superficial Relationship Tendency

Here’s where a couple of these negative tendencies spill over on one another. The best way I know to overcome this tendency toward superficiality is to think about the sales calls you want to make, to think about your customers, and to plan, before you are in front of the customer, what information you would like to gather. And the best way to do that is to ask yourself what you would like to know about this customer. Create a series of questions that you ask yourself. Questions like these:

• Do I know how this product application fits into the rest of their systems?
• Do I know what the consequences are for them if they don’t get a good solution to this problem?
• Do I know what the positive implications are for them if they do solve this problem, or achieve this objective?
• Do I know what those consequences and implications mean for the key decision makers?
• Do I know how this account makes their money or how they appeal to their customers?
• Do I know this account’s vision of their business, their mission, and their basic strategy?
• Do I know what motivates the key decision makers?

This is just a start, but you have the idea. Once you create a set of questions for yourself, the next step for any question for which the answer is “no, I don’t know that,” is to seek out that information.

When you seek and discover the information prompted by these questions, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your accounts.

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