How to Avoid Losing Sales Deals: Top Mistakes to Watch Out For

Discover the crucial mistakes that can cost you sales deals and learn how to avoid them to ensure you achieve your sales targets.

You want to win the opportunities you create. Without winning your deals, you may fail to reach your sales goals or targets. You may also lose the commissions that make up some percentage of your income.

Most of the time here, you will find strategies and tactics to help you win more than your fair share of deals. But today, we will explore the other side, namely, what may prevent you from winning. You can avoid losing by recognizing why your clients don’t prefer to buy from you.

Inability to Create Value: You risk losing deals when you are unable to create value for your client in the sales conversation. When we talk about creating value, we are referring to the idea that you educate your clients on their problem and the decision they are considering. You can learn to create value in some B2B sales trainings.

Information Disparity in B2B Sales: To create value, the most important strategy is information disparity. If you don’t know things that your clients don’t know, you will have trouble winning deals. Because you sell every day, your experience will help you know what your client needs to know. When you share that, you can create value.

Proving Your Expertise in Sales Conversations: If your contact doesn’t believe that you are an expert in your industry, they may lose their faith in your ability to help them solve their problem and make the right decision. You can find how to maintain your credibility and expertise by picking up Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative.

Decision-Making in the Era of Sales: You may not know that we have left the Era of the Solution and are now in the Era of Decision Making. When your client is trying to make a rare decision that comes with serious implications, you must be able to lead them through their decision-making process. If you fail them, your client may stall at best, and at worst, they may break off and search for some competitor who can ensure the confidence and certainty they need to say yes.

Importance of Sales Homework: If you don’t already have experience in the client’s industry, you must do the work to understand the headwinds and tailwinds they are likely facing. Should you fail to do this, your client will peg you as a greenhorn (someone too new to be much help). Your contacts can tell when you did your homework, and they know when you have failed to do the research and reading required to be useful.

Avoiding a Transactional Sales Approach: When you are transactional, your client is likely to reach out to one of your competitors for a better experience. Going beyond the transactional means that you help clients pursue their strategic outcomes. There are a number of reasons why buyers reject this approach, starting with the fact that you succeed in business sales if you act like you are selling a gallon of milk. When you try to sell as fast as possible, your client cannot keep up, and you seem like you care only about their money. You can learn to create value in Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition.

Showing Genuine Care for Clients: You may not spend much time thinking about how to care about your client and their desired outcomes. Anything you do that leads your prospective client to believe that you will fail to be there when something goes wrong or you are not invested in ensuring their success reduces your odds of winning the deal. If you don’t care about your clients, your odds of winning and keeping their business are about the same as winning the Mega Millions two weeks in a row.

Importance of Listening in Sales: You might believe that your skill is communicating, which is important, but it’s not the only thing to work on. The last thing you want is for your prospective client to ask you to call them next week to schedule a next meeting. (It’s not going to happen.) You can avoid this fate by being the very best listener your contact has ever encountered in all the days of their life. It is essential that you listen as if your deal depends on it. You must listen carefully to what your client is communicating to you.

The Power of Note-Taking in Sales: If you are not taking notes as your clients share with you, your client is going to worry that you will not remember the important things they explained to you in the sales conversation. You should also know that if you have to ask a question that your client has already answered, you could lose a deal you might have won.

Keeping Commitments to Win Deals: You promised your client that you would do something, but you failed to keep your commitment. Maybe you didn’t write it down or, perhaps you were trying to win another deal. If you are unreliable, you are almost certain of losing deals you might have won.

Conclusion

Each of the ideas here is designed to help you understand why you lose deals. These are unforced errors, ones you can only avoid by knowing what will likely cause you to lose opportunities. You may have more than enough deals, as your sales manager requires you to have 2X or 4X pipeline. But if we are being honest, much of that coverage will not be won any time soon.

If you are a salesperson, use this list to audit the things you might be doing to cause a loss. If you need help with any of these, you can search the blog for strategies or answers. If you are a sales leader, you can use this article to lead a meeting about how to avoid losing.

Do good work, and I’ll see you here tomorrow for more.