Four Mistakes Sales People Make - #4 (Final)

You’ve heard the saying, “we all have a purpose in life” and as I relate that thought to the world of sales, every phone call, every client meeting, every email, (I’m making a point here), every client interaction needs to have a purpose and goal. When we lose sight of that we are making the last of the most common mistakes sales people make. In the my final post in the series, 4 common mistakes sales people make, we’ll talk about how to avoid this costly mistake.

Mistake #4: They lose sight of the goal.
Ask yourself, what is the point of this visit? What do I want to accomplish on this sales call? Am I going to sell something and if so, what is it? Am I trying to get another, more strategic meeting? Is it to show the customer that I can add value as I continue to establish trust and rapport with them? All these questions, should happen well before your phone is in hand or you are in your car en route to see the customer.

Setting your objective
Knowing your objective is the key to all the other steps in the selling process, without it, you are flying blind and you most likely will be wasting your time, your client’s time and odds are, you won’t be walking out with a sale. Once you set your objective, what it is you want to achieve on that sales visit or phone call, everything else will quickly fall into place. With a clear objective, you can begin to think about:

What questions to ask the customer to get them thinking about your objective.
If your objective is to sell a product or service, you can think about what it is about the product/service that your customer would be most interested in and prepare to speak to those features and benefits.
You can think of any objections your customer might raise and prepare for them.
It will enable you to prepare your presentation materials, product samples or any leave behind material.
You can prepare a plan for the next steps that will take place once the client agrees, an education plan, a retail sales plan, a merchandising plan, a ready made promotion around the product.

To me, a successful sales interaction starts and ends with setting and knowing your objective. When I am working with a team in a training environment, I attempt to replicate real life selling conditions as much as possible. We know that, in the real world, selling doesn’t follow a simple path from A to Z and things happen on a sales call to take us off track. That makes having an objective even more important. If we get taken off track, we can get back on.

Another point to remember is, a goal or objective isn’t going to do anything for us unless we ask for the it. A lot of times, we’ll set our objective, prepare and when we get to the moment of truth in the sales call…we don’t come out and ask for it. If you don’t ask for the longer meeting, you won’t get it. If you don’t ask for the sale, it doesn’t happen. Often, with all the questions we’ve asked, presenting the features and benefits, resolving the objections sometimes we think we’ve asked for it – but we haven’t. Go ahead a make sure to close the deal.

If there is one take away from reading this post or working with me in the classroom event, it is to set your objective. It is at the very heart of the process and will lead to success. Good luck!