Common sales mistakes

Want to know what NOT to do in sales? Here are some pointers.

As markets tighten I thought we could reflect on some lessons learnt in the past by highly experienced, successful sales people.

The following lessons are from some of the participants of my “Sell Like a Woman” research project and make for interesting reading in “what not to do” in sales.

Here is the first part of a three part series on common sales mistakes.

Arrogance and hubris

Sometimes when you are on a roll with a product or brand (or even with your own success as a sales person), it’s way too easy to lose sight of the client’s real needs.

You can easily get caught up in your own mythology. Especially when first starting out as a young rep, I made some disastrous blunders – stopped treating clients as individuals, broke a few core promises because “our brand is so successful now that clients have to understand that we need to do this to keep growing” – and I look back now with shame.

The big changes I made was to go back to basics, remember that I am only as good as last month’s results, and be very, very grateful to both my company AND my client base for paying my wages. [Trudy]

Putting all your eggs in one basket

Probably the biggest mistake I made was to win a contract, and spend the next year developing and growing it, and then over next two and a half years perfecting it. This then made this customer dominate our business. It consumed quite a lot of focus and resource.

Since then, I have ensured that I balance new sales with additional business. I have to keep myself in check, as I tend to give away far too much of myself, in terms of time and company investment, with no guarantee of return. It’s a new process of self discipline, matching output to need without sacrificing value-add. [Helen]

Restricting your contact to one or two in the organisation – the broader the contact, the better understanding you will have of their business. [Libby]

Under-rating your competitors (or believing your own sales story)

Believing everything you read publically about your competitors and what a customer tells you. They do not always match up to what is real and actually happens in the market place. [Stacy]

Selling a service that was not backed up by excellent customer service as I believed it would be. I had to tell the customer that I would do everything to change the internal culture of the organisation, but I couldn’t. I learnt that I need to influence much more than the sales function and since then I have chosen companies that I work for and positions within those companies more wisely. [Hilary]

Bagging the competitors. Oh my, did I have to eat humble pie when I did this early in my career. One of my biggest customers was related to one of my competitors and I nearly lost the whole deal because I shot off my mouth about that competitor company and the person concerned being dodgy. I had no real evidence they were dodgy at all. I just was going on hearsay from the gossip in the field. BIG BIG mistake. [Sally]

Not understanding your customer’s real needs (business and personal)

Not having a broad enough product knowledge and trying to fit my square product into the client round hole. Not understanding the business problem – such as when selling training services and the HR person says they need a certain skill and I didn’t know what the business context was. As a result the service I delivered was a waste of time and money. I learnt to trust my gut instinct; if I didn’t understand why the client wanted to buy I wouldn’t sell anything until I did understand. [Jill]

Selling the client the “Rolls Royce” solution they can’t afford.

The client insisted they required the “big” solution, then I discovered the competitor’s “Holden” was all they could have afforded. Always a trap for young players, especially with government customers. It is always depressing to be told by a client that you were the one they wanted but… [Kate]

Not asking the money questions or doing credit checks to see if your clients can afford it. Then wasting so much time on “no sale” when I could have asked more specific questions to determine the real situation. [Sue]

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