5 ERRONEOUS BELIEFS KILLING YOUR SALES PERFORMANCE

1. Selling is driven by Salesperson

Salespeople believe that selling is driven by the salesperson.  Salespeople believe that product push is a good selling technique.  But the reality is, that this is one of the oldest and the most harmful beliefs which traditional salespeople carry.  The reality is that the customer buys not because that salesperson is pushing them but they genuinely need the product and he/she is only motivating him to make the decision.

At times, if a salesperson is pushing too hard the customer gets annoyed and he simply refuses to listen further.  So selling is not driven by salesperson rather a salesperson is only a facilitator to help the customer understand about the product and its usability.

Your job as a salesperson is not to change the customer’s mind but to convince him that your product is the right choice for him to achieve his buying objective.

2. Using anything that works

Many salespeople very proudly claim that everything is fair in love and business.  They follow all the tactics to make money and are not much concerned about satisfying the customer.  There cannot be a bigger mistake than this.  Because with this approach, you are allowed to lie, plead, cajole, intermediate and even embarrass the customer.  As long as you get his or her agreement to buy all is fair.

But this is a very old school thought and does not work anymore. The reality is that customer satisfaction is the key to any business. Today the customer has a plethora of options to choose from. Therefore, your approach has to be fair and customer satisfaction has to be kept on the top most priority.

3. Using The Predefined Sales Pitch

The sales trainers happily advocate that the salespeople must memorize a pre-designed selling script because they think that it will help them cover all sellable aspects of the product, and no important feature will be missed out.

But with this approach, the problem is that the salespeople become oblivious of implicit requirements of the customer. As a result, all such requirements remain unaddressed during the sales process.  With this approach, the salespeople follow a defined track to reach his selling goal. Therefore, this is also called track selling. The problem with the script technique is that it assumes that customers are stupid or infinitely malleable.

It assumes that the customer will let you take charge of the selling process.  But today the scenario is much different, the customers are educated, well informed and take wise decisions before spending any penny. Therefore in reality, the traditional sales people these days do not find opportunity to use the predefined sales pitch.  And whenever they try to use it they soon realize that the customer is coming up with lots of questions and soon they get derailed.

4. Doing more leg work to succeed

Salespeople believe that selling is a number game, which is the traditional wisdom.  But with this approach you do not analyze what you may be doing wrong and you continue doing the same thing.  But every sales situation is different and need to be analyzed in advance and a thorough preparation has to be done to tackle the challenges of the situation.

The sales managers track the conversion ratio.  A traditional salesperson tends to increase the number of calls attended by them so that they can achieve their sales targets with the conversion ratio they are operating with.

But the smart salespeople do not focus on increasing the number of calls, rather they focus on improving the conversion ratio by improving the quality of their sales conversation.  They focus a lot on the analysis of various aspects of their sales process.  They prepare for each and every call as a unique opportunity and they go to the market with a high level of preparation so that they can close the sales on every call.

5. Being over Positive

You have been told again and again that for a salesperson being positive is highly required.  You need to get out to the market thinking that you will get the sale on every call. You are told to win over with positive thinking.  But a positive attitude is only a logical necessity.

Surely, it is helpful to be confident and full of conviction.  But more than that you need to have your sales process right.  You need to have a systematic repeatable way to interact with your customer which can convince him to buy. You need to be very clear about prospecting, delivering, presentation, handling objections and negotiating to close the deal.