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 four and five, not necessarily in order of priority. See to what degree you (or your sales force) may be guilty of them.
#4 Mistake: Poor Questioning
This is a variation of the third mistake, contentment with the superficial. I am absolutely astonished at the lack of thoughtfulness that I often see on the part of salespeople. Some use questions like sledgehammers, splintering the relationship and bruising the sensibility of their customers by thoughtless questions.
Others don’t use them at all, practically ignoring the most important part of a sales call. They labor under the misconception that the more they talk, the better job of selling they do — when the truth lies in exactly the opposite approach.
And others are content to play about the surface of the issue. “How much of this do you use?” “What do you not like about your current supplier?” Their questions are superficial at best, redundant and irritating at worst.
The result? These salespeople never really uncover the deeper, more intense issues that motivate their customers. Instead, they continually react to the common complaint of customers who have been given no reason to think otherwise: “Your price is too high.”
Fewer sales, constant complaints about pricing, frustrated salespeople, impatient managers, and unimpressed customers — all of these result from the inability to use the salesperson’s most powerful tool with skill and sensitivity.
Overcoming the Tendency of Poor Questioning
We’re back again to planning and preparing. This time, the focus of our planning time is creating good questions. By taking the time to prepare good sales questions, word for word, before the sales call, we ensure that our questioning will be far more effective than if we rely on our spur-of-the-moment ability to create on the fly. Spend some of that planning time doing just that — creating good questions word for word.
#5 Mistake: No Investment in Themselves
Here’s an amazing observation. No more than five percent of active, full-time professional salespeople ever invest in their own growth. That means that only one of 20 salespeople has ever spent $20.00 of their own money on a book on sales, or subscribed to a sales magazine, taken a sales course, or attended a sales seminar of their own choosing and on their own nickel.
Don’t believe me? Take a poll. Ask your salespeople or your colleagues how many of them have invested more than $20.00 in a book, magazine, course, etc. in the last 12 months. Ask those who venture a positive answer to substantiate it by naming their investment. Don’t be surprised if the answers get vague. You’ll quickly find out how many salespeople in your organization have invested in themselves.
Sales is the only profession I know of where the overwhelming majority of practitioners are content with their personal status quo.
Why is that? A number of reasons.
Some mistakenly think that their jobs are so unique that they cannot possibly learn anything from anyone else. This attitude dooms them to a lifetime of mediocrity.
Still, others think they know it all. They have, therefore, no interest in taking time from some seemingly valuable thing they are doing to attend a seminar or read a book. They are destined to be obsolete in a world that is changing faster than at any time in the past.
Some don’t care. Their focus is hanging on to their jobs, not necessarily getting better at them.
But I think the major reason is that the overwhelming majority of salespeople do not view themselves as professionals and, therefore, do not have professional expectations for themselves. They worked their way up from the customer service desk or they landed in sales by chance, and they view their work as a job to be done, not a profession within which to grow.
They are content to let their companies arrange for their training or development. And between you and me, they would prefer that their companies really didn’t do anything that would require them to actually change what they do.
Overcoming This Tendency
Decide to fix it. It really is that simple. If you rarely, if ever, actually invest in your own growth, then decide to fix it. Decide to view your job as a profession, and decide to be a professional. That means that, of course, you’ll invest in your own growth.
Once you make that decision, then it’s easy to come up with resources to do so. Decide to go to at least one seminar a year, and start watching your mailbox for likely suspects. Decide to read a book once a month, and visit the library or your local book store regularly. Decide to expose yourself to new and good ideas, and regularly visit the websites and newsletters that support salespeople.
Once you decide to do it, the doing is easy. It’s the decision that’s required.
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