There are many mistakes salespeople make that hurt their sales. These five are a bit different. These are the five career-ending mistakes salespeople make and repeat over and over. These mistakes, if not corrected quickly, will kill most any sales career.
Not owning the product they sell
When I was a young boy, I had pictures of cars instead of bikini-clad girls on my wall. I dreamed about the cars that I wanted to own long before I started dreaming of a career. At 23, I drove to a Ford dealership to apply for my first job as a car salesman in a 12-year-old beater car. I was offered the job and began selling cars the next day.
Weeks went by, and I began having modest success, but nowhere near the success that I knew I should be having. Too many customers walk out without buying because they said before dreaded words, “I can’t afford it.”
I began feeling guilty about not owning a Ford myself. I realized that I had not yet bought the truck I wanted because I felt as though I could not afford it. Zig Ziglar said that selling is the transference of emotion. It is making my customer feel like I feel about my product. In that way, I was very successful at that dealership.
I didn’t learn until years later that if I wanted to overcome any customer objection that I hear regularly, I must have first overcome it by owning the product.
It is difficult to sell a product one does not own himself. This is usually the first of the five career-ending mistakes salespeople make.
Talking too much
God bless him. He listened patiently through my entire presentation. I must have talked about that car for over an hour. He wasn’t speaking very much, so I needed to fill the silence with more words. I blathered on and on about feature after feature. Today, I teach salespeople that this is called “vomiting the value proposition (VVP).” VVP is when I talk endlessly about a product without asking questions regarding the customer’s needs.
Eventually, once we got inside, I started talking to the man about financing options. His eyes suddenly lit up. I completed the credit application and submitted it to my managers. A few minutes later, the finance manager walked out and asked permission to be introduced to my customer.
As it turns out, my customer went through a spell of bad luck and suffered bankruptcy. He had just come out of it and was getting his life back on track. All he needed was transportation and financing. The finance manager took us outside and showed the man two cars he believed he could get financed. The man pointed at the tan one, and we went back inside.
By this point, I had probably spent about three hours with this customer. The whole thing could’ve taken less than half an hour if I would’ve slowed down and asked a few questions in the beginning rather than talking for three hours
They are afraid of bothering people
“That guy is a real creeper,” my friend said to me as she joined the group of guys I was talking to. She felt uneasy because a guy from across the room was weirdly looking at her. She joined our group as though she was joining heard for protection.
“Which guy? Where?” As she nonchalantly shifted her eyes in the direction of the offender. When we saw him, we all smiled at one another. Instantly we knew he was not a “creeper.” He was just a guy awkwardly trying to express interest in a woman while unaccompanied. Almost every man has been in that position, and every woman has felt creeped out by a man behaving that way. We don’t blame her. Usually, we kick ourselves knowing that if we were her, we’d probably be creeped out too.
The funny thing is, the poor man’s lack of confidence, and his fear of seeming creepy, made him even creepier. Had the man walked up and introduced himself, asked her if he could buy her a drink, and told her he was new in the area, things would have gone much more smoothly. Even if she declined the invitation. Instead, he sat there alone — his eyes darting back and forth between her and his glass as he tried to muster the confidence to speak to her.
Rejection is a sort of currency in the sales industry. We will experience it far more than success. Fearing rejection is the thing that makes us seem creepy. Being perceived as creepy is much worse than hearing no. Customers will flee to the safety of the herd even faster than my friend did in the bar.
Rather than contemplating one’s next move from a distance, one should be confident in his approach. One of the five career-ending mistakes salespeople make is being afraid to bother folks.
They have a scarcity mindset
I had a real estate agent come to me and ask for help. He was such a hard worker. There was scarcely a time I went to the office when I didn’t see them there on the phone or working on a transaction. He confided in me that he was putting in 60 and sometimes even 80 hours per week and was barely making $60,000 per year.
I looked at his transactions, and I saw a glaring commonality. Almost all of them were low-priced homes in very modest areas. I began asking the agent about his childhood and where he grew up. As I suspected, he grew up in a very humble neighborhood and was raised by a single mother. He made the determination early on to work hard and make a success himself.
While it may seem counterintuitive, that was his problem. His mother had consistently demonstrated hard work to him. He knew how to do that very well. His problem was that he felt like he could only relate to customers buying in neighborhoods similar to the one he lived in as a child. His mindset did not let him consider the possibility of working with wealthier clients. He always said he wanted to work in higher-end areas with higher price points but was perplexed at how continuously ended up working with low-income clients.
I worked with this agent for several months, helping him feel wealthier. He needed help gaining a new perspective on wealth. We even discovered latent disapproval of wealthy people. Slowly, his business began to shift. I wish I could say that he was now selling multimillion-dollar estates. That’s not true. He is selling homes in the suburbs. He makes a decent living, and he lives in the suburbs himself.
They don't farm and follow-up
The final mistake is probably the most fatal. In my book, I talk about an encounter I had with a master salesman who taught me how to truly value customers. I made the mistake that many salespeople make at the beginning of their careers. I focused solely on the customer in front of me. The only more astonishing thing than my rapid rise to the top was the fall I had once I became burned out.
I liken salespeople who focus solely on customers in front of them to a hunting society. Like prehistoric men, they hunt for their food and only eat what they kill. They are nomadic and move from place to place, constantly battling other hunters for happy hunting grounds. In this metaphor, these salespeople represent those who never follow up with any customers. In their minds, once a customer walks out the door, she is lost forever.
Other salespeople only gather and farm. They spend all their time working toward the harvest that may or may not come. While this group is better off long-term than the hunters, they can still go hungry with one bad harvest. It would seem that the proper formula is becoming a hunter-gatherer. We plant crops on fertile soil by doing a follow-up, and we focus on customers in front of us today. This means continuing to cultivate our database.
Cave art represents the great conquests of hunting expeditions. This is often like watercooler talk. While not as celebrated, it’s usually the farmer who eats regularly. Avoiding the five career-ending mistakes salespeople make means having a strategy for the non-glamorous world of farming.
Conclusion
All of us fall into these mistakes during certain periods in our sales careers. I believe that there is no way to avoid these mistakes all the time. The key is recognizing them as they come and taking effective action to get around them. If you recognize any of these mistakes plaguing your sales career, you may find my book, “Sales According to Paul” a helpful guide. Also, subscribe to this blog for more ideas.
