Salespeople Mistakes

Let’s take a closer look at our most important employees — these are salespeople. They bring us money. Consider their main mistakes.

Failure to make contact. Quite often, this mistake is associated with four points: the inability to tune in to contact, the psychological negative in relation to active sales, insufficient preparation for the meeting, and the lack of techniques for starting a conversation. The manager should give clear instructions to the employee about what information needs to be collected about the client (organization and decision maker) before the meeting, as well as provide clear scenarios for the start of the visit.

Selling to yourself. Many of us tend to measure the world by ourselves: to give others gifts that we would like to receive ourselves; to impose on children their own unrealized dreams and desires; motivate subordinates by offering them incentives that are meaningful to us. This mistake is also common among salespeople — they sell to others according to a scheme that is attractive to themselves. With such a mistake, the main thing is to pay attention to the fact itself (many people simply don’t notice this shortcoming), and also to remind that we first identify needs with the help of open questions and only then we start the actual sale-presentation.

Failure to identify needs. Everything is trite here: you need to teach the employee to ask exactly open questions. In addition, you need to explain why closed questions are not enough (many new salespeople sincerely believe that closed questions are much faster and more convenient to use).

Wrong questions. A common mistake is to use closed questions instead of open questions, and not to use alternative questions (“choice without choice”), which are especially relevant when closing a sale or reaching intermediate agreements.

Inability to deal with objections. Three types of errors are very typical:

• The salesperson enters into a dispute. It is necessary to explain to the employee that as soon as we entered into a dispute with the client, he stops hearing us and thinks only about counterarguments, and also show the technology of how to agree with the client correctly.
• The salesperson agrees on the basis of the principle “Yes, it’s expensive, but …” It is worth showing how absurd such a wording sounds in the “reverse” version: “Yes, poor quality, but …”
• The agreement is given correctly, but the argument does not include the necessary clarifications. As a result, the seller gives the wrong arguments. For example, when saying “expensive”, the client means “Convince me that it’s worth it”, and the salesperson begins to compare his product with competitors, which often leads the client to consider evaluating competing offers, although he did not initially intend to do this.

The desire to insist on his own at any cost. It is typical for persistent, purposeful and ambitious employees. In itself, the desire to convince and insist is a very commendable trait, but in large quantities it can frighten and even offend the client. If your employee is prone to making such a mistake, it is worthwhile to show him during the analysis of a joint visit where the limits of reasonable pressure are planted.

The desire to yield to the client in everything. Customer focus is commendable, but can be brought to the point of absurdity. This is especially true for employees with an external reference. To begin with, you should try to convince the employee that excessive compliance can cause doubt on the part of the client or undermine his confidence in the seller or product. If that doesn’t help, just limit the employee’s powers.

Inability to work with the price, fear of talking about the price. The main thing here is the confidence of the salesperson that the product or service is worth the money that is requested for it. The proactivity of the manager is also very important here if the pricing policy changes or competitors enter the market with a different price level. It is necessary to prepare employees in advance for a possible change in the situation.