How to Completely Blow a Sale

 

Much has been written about the best practices involved with selling your products. Less has been said about what not to do – about the biggest and most disastrous mistakes you can make during the selling process to completely blow the deal. Not that salespeople haven’t figured them out through trial and error. Says William Bauer, managing director of Royce Leather, “I used to talk about my products before I understood the needs or problems my customer had, which was essentially like shooting at a target with your eyes closed and not knowing where the target is.”

For this blog post, we wanted to get specific and figure out exactly where the sales process went wrong. As such, we spoke to a number of lifelong salespeople to find out their biggest and most damaging selling mistakes. Want to make sure you miss out on a sale? Try one of these tactics. But hey, look at the silver lining: At least you’ll get to go home early.

Sell Anything to Anyone

Want to quickly see your sales failures pile up? Don’t worry about finding the right product and matching it to the right customer. Simply try to sell everything you can to anyone who will listen.

“When I started PetInsuranceQuotes.com we were focused on selling anything to anyone,” says Nick Braun, the company’s founder and CEO. “Rookie mistake. For the first two years we were chasing any pet owner who was interested in pet insurance. I suppose we thought we could sell the product to anyone and spent a lot of time, money, and other resources trying to convert every visitor to our website. We realized, after a lot of pain and suffering, that we needed to focus on pet owners who actually wanted the services we were offering.”

Braun says the business’s selling efforts didn’t start working until “we stopped wasting time on tire-kickers and started focusing more on serious buyers. We started to invest our resources into the most likely buyers and doubling-down on our existing customers.”

Selling, says Braun, comes down to following “the path of least resistance.” Don’t try to force a product into a market where it doesn’t work, and vice versa. “Invest in the people who want your service and filter out those who aren’t serous about buying. It’s simply not worth spending your time on people who will never buy. Focus on those who want to buy but need help getting over their legitimate objections.”

Set Prices Based Only on the Competition

Setting prices is a complex problem that can take into account dozens of variables ranging from raw materials costs to seasonal market conditions. Or you can just prepare for a disaster by following the footsteps of RankTracer Enterprise’s David Mercer. Mercer says he simply cut prices to quickly and crudely beat the competition to a sale.

“The biggest mistake we made was lowering our prices in response to the pricing structure of new competitors,” says Mercer. “They burst onto the scene with lower costs, and we responded by lowering our costs. It was a huge mistake because we upset many loyal customers who had been paying higher prices and, as it turns out, people weren’t unhappy with our pricing in the first place. We were seen as good value despite being priced higher. Lowering our costs on a whim, without any real pressure to, actually eroded our value offering.”

It’s an old lesson, but understanding your cost and pricing model and truly understanding what your worth is key in both product and service businesses. Any changes to that model should only be undertaken after they’ve received serious consideration and after other alternatives have been rejected. “Being competitive based purely on price is not a fun game and, more often than not, it’s not one you have to play,” says Mercer.

Wing It

Mike Veny is a speaker who uses drumming in corporate team-building and workshop environments to offer something a little different than the usual routine of trust falls and ropes courses. As a percussionist, it’s safe to say that Veny knows a little something about improvisation. But while impromptu jamming may work on the bongos, in a sales situation it’s a first step toward failure.

“Not being prepared to address objections not only lost me sales, but lost me relationships,” says Veny. “In the past, if someone had a price objection about hiring me, I would become anxious, desperate, and say anything that I could in hopes of making the sale. This never ended well because I came off as a desperate, and it either turned leads off completely or they hired me at a reduced price.” This is strikingly common in service businesses where direct costs are relatively small, leading many to feel that a price cuts may be worth it, since the alternative is essentially making nothing at all.

That’s usually wrong-headed and can lead to long-term damage to a business. So Veny did what any savvy sales professional does and itemized the most common objections he faced, and then developed scripts on how to overcome them. Committing these scripts to memory keeps him on his toes and makes him come off as far more professional — and, he says, has led to a “huge increase in sales.”

Wait Until the Last Possible Moment

Procrastination is rampant throughout many businesses, and if you really want to fail at selling, make it a core value of your sales organization.

Ryan Hulland, president of flooring provider Netfloor USA, relates a sales story that came about during an RFP preparation. “We had a large bid coming up, and it was due at a very specific time of day. We had just implemented new security measures, including new password protection on our computers. Well, the new security worked a little too well. I couldn’t remember the new password, and had no way to access my proposal.”

Hulland had to submit the proposal based on an older draft with details like pricing hastily scribbled in with a pen. Locked out of his computer, he couldn’t even email the proposal to the prospect but rather had to fax it to them, hardly the height of professionalism in today’s digital world. Miraculously, Hulland won the bid – even though the client had to hunt down its own fax machine to be able to accept it.

Delay can be a useful negotiating tactic to avoid appearing over-eager, but it can be a dangerous game if you play it too aggressively (or through simple carelessness). Hungrier competitors can beat you to the punch – particularly if they position timeliness and quick responsiveness as a competitive advantage – and lock you out of sales before you ever get a chance to present your position. In any event, whether or not you want to delay before you submit a bid or other proposal, the key is to be prepared for contingencies and be ready to present or discuss your proposal well in advance of any deadlines.

Don’t Sweat the Details

One killer way to lose the sale every time: Make sure every customer knows he or she isn’t special but rather just another dollar in your coffers.

AJ Saleem, owner and academic director for Suprex Private Tutoring, says his biggest mistake is an all-too-common one: “I sent a discount that I meant for another person to a prospective client. I had originally created that discount because I wanted to give it to a well networked person to refer additional customers. In the end, I was forced to give the new client a discount that cost me around 100 dollars.”

Getting the little things right isn’t hard, but it does take time and conscientiousness. Making mistakes on simple details can cost you revenue — or, at worst, cost you the customer.

Make Broad Assumptions About Your Customer

As a corollary to the previous tip, another surefire way to annoy, offend, or otherwise run your customer off is to assume they are something that they are not. This can often be the result of a well-meaning but misguided attempt to be friendly.

Derek Nadon is sales manager for Dupray, which sells steam cleaning equipment. “Once upon a time,” he says, “I spent a forty-minute phone call thinking that ‘Charlie’ was a man. Charlie had a very deep and raspy voice. Charlie ended up being a woman. She was pretty annoyed that I wasn’t able to differentiate between the genders, and actually got pretty upset about. What did I learn? Do way more research on your potential clients. Figure out the five W’s: who, what, where, why, and when.” Most all, it would seem: who.

Richard Swartz, president of fur retailer Mano Swartz, offers a similar take on this theme. “I was 25 years old and very green as a salesperson,” he says. “I sold a coat to man in his 60s who came into our store with a young woman who was in her late 20s. When I wrote up the sale I said to the man, ‘Your wife is going to love it.’ He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Son, if my wife finds out, you are a dead man.’

“I learned never to assume anything when selling and, certainly, to keep your mouth shut.”