How You Fail In Sales

Selling is difficult. It’s easy to fail. Here are some the way you can fail.

Failure to be known: You aren’t going to succeed in sales if you aren’t known. Unless people know you and what you do, you’re not going to create the opportunities you need to succeed.

Failure to connect: You still need to be liked. You have to connect with people. If you don’t connect, it’s difficult for people to choose to spend more time with you.

Failure to gain trust: Connection isn’t the only relationship component you need to create. You also need to build trust. You can be known and liked but not trusted. Without trust, you’re going nowhere.

Failure to create opportunities: Just because your prospective client has agreed to meet with you doesn’t mean you really have an opportunity. You have to create that opportunity be capturing dissatisfaction or helping to create it.

Failure to create value: Your job in sales is to create value for your buyer through their buying process. If you don’t create value, if you don’t have big ideas that make a difference, if you waste your prospective client’s time, you won’t create or move an opportunity forward.

Failure to gain commitments: Only bored, receptive buyers like professional visitors, the salespeople who spend time in their offices never asking for a commitment, never moving a deal forward. Without the ability to ask for an gain commitments, you can’t succeed in sales. Sales is conversations and commitments.

Failure to gain consensus: You may think you are calling on “the” decision-maker. But decisions are mostly made after consensus has been reached. You have to help build that consensus. Without it, the status quo wins and you lose.

Failure to present the right solution: You can have the best idea in the world, but if your dream client doesn’t share that vision, it’s wrong. You either sell them what you believe is right or you help them buy what they already want. Buyers buy what they believe to be the right solution.

Failure to ask for the business: You have to close. You have to ask for the business. You have to get a signature. This is part of selling, even if you don’t want to be “salesy.”