The Blatant Truth Weblog

Three Simple Steps to Facilitate Failure

For a salesperson or business owner, failure can be traumatic with long-term consequences. Unfortunately, many very smart, business-minded people do fail at selling their products or services for a variety of simple reasons. The following steps are often neglected causing sales to be lost and businesses to fail.

Failure to Replenish

You’ve been focused on making a big sale, and your thoughts and energies have been directed towards one especially promising prospect. Meanwhile, your prospect list has dwindled, and you’ll soon have no one in your sales funnel. While it’s necessary to pay special attention to prospects who might prove to be lucrative, it’s a grave mistake to stop the pursuit of new prospects to concentrate solely on another. Your sales funnel should be dynamic, ever growing and changing. Replenishing your prospect list needs to be a regular function, not something you only work on when you have nothing to do.

Failure to Stay on the Grid

Are you great at the initial push towards making a sale, and then neglect to maintain contact through the entire sales cycle and after a sale is made? Do you expect your prospects and clients to do the work for you? If you are responsible for sales, it’s your job to stay on the grid and maintain ongoing contact. If you aren’t keeping up with them, your competitors will.

Failure to Probe

You might have clients who have purchased the same thing from you for years, but does this justify you not probing for their needs? Absolutely not! It’s not for you to decide whether or not they need something new, but it is your responsibility to find out what they need each and every time that you engage in the sales process. Clients’ needs do change, and if you aren’t asking the right questions and presenting the right products and services, you are simply leaving business on the table.