In 16 years of Sales Training and Coaching thousands, I’ve noticed that almost every salesperson is committing one or more of the following seven deadly sins. Knowing these and being aware of them gives you the opportunity to improve your effectiveness anywhere from 20% to more than 200%.
The astute among you will read these, take them to heart and look for ways to implement them. The sloth and lazy will let this email sit in their in box vowing one day to come to come back and read them. That never happens.
DEADLY SALES TRAINING SIN #1: Your Customers and Clients Don’t Trust You Enough To Refer You to Their Closest Relationships
Clients value their relationships more than they value their money. They think, rightly so, “I can get more money but it is hard to get more friends, especially good ones. It is amazing how many people are willingly to give you money but are not willing to introduce you to their closest friends. You can judge how strong your relationships with clients are by how many referrals they give you. If you are not getting referrals it speaks volumes about how you are perceived. Solution: Start building stronger relationships with your clients and customers.
DEADLY SALES TRAINING SIN #2: Your Clients Refer You to Low Value Prospects
If you are getting low value referrals it is because your clients don’t trust you or you have not taught them who your ideal client is. Solution: Train your clients how to identify and engage the people who fit your ideal client profile.
DEADLY SALES TRAINING SIN #3: Not Understanding The Emotional Reasons Your Clients Buy
You’re guilty of this sin if, when you think back over the last 10 selling appointments, you can’t recall what the client’s emotional pain was, how they defined that pain, what impact that pain was having on them personally, and how eliminating that pain would affect their life. Solution: Quit pitching and take professional sales training that will help you develop listening and counseling skills that will help you get the prospects to reveal their deeply held fears and emotions.
DEADLY SALES TRAINING SIN #4: Inability to Get Buyer’s To Make a Decision “NOW”
This is one of the most common problems I see when training sales people. Getting buyer’s to make buying decisions involves building trust and having deep emotional conversations about their problems and their goals and dreams. Solution: To get prospects to make help them imagine what achieving that ultimate goal will mean for them and how it will make them feel.
DEADLY SALES TRAINING SIN #5: Ineffective or Nonexistent Marketing
On average, it’s five times harder and more expensive to acquire a new client or customer than it is to do another transaction with an existing client or customer. Each month that we don’t communicate with our clients, their propensity to do business with us again drops by 10%. That means that after a year of no contact, we basically have turned what could be a loyal client into someone who is at the same stage as when he or she was a new prospect. Solution: Create and send each client a monthly printed newsletter that builds the relationship.
**Yea, I know email is faster and cheaper, yada, yada, yada, but it does not build relationships like a printed newsletter. Bluntly stated, if you don’t do this you are a fool and you deserve all the misfortune that comes your way.
DEADLY SALES TRAINING SIN #6: Failure to Build Raving Fans Who Identify With You Personally
Your clients and customers want more than a business relationship. Frankly, they can get what you sell from a dozen others just like. What they can’t get from anyone else is the personal relationship you have with them. At the end of the day, we are all in the relationship business and people do business with people. Good marketing can help you do just that. Solution: Develop marketing initiatives that position you as the kind of person that people admire, want to be around and would like to emulate.
DEADLY SALES TRAINING SIN # 7: Failure to Embrace Lifelong Learning
Once you have freed yourself of the first six deadly sins, you can still fail if you do not embrace lifelong learning. Fact is, you will never know all there is to know about what you do. Nor will you ever know all you should know. Moore’s law states that information doubles every 18 months. If you are not aggressively consuming more knowledge you will soon be obsolete. Solution: Join a Mastermind group, get a coach, engage in more sales training, and attend more content rich educational seminars. And if you are real serious do like me and do all of the above. Doing so will put you in the top 5% income level of people in your profession.
Not doing these things will ensure that you stay mired among the mediocre majority.