by Bill Brooks, The
Brooks Group
If you could boil down every mistake that is killing your
golf game to five essential things, you’d pay a lot of money,
wouldn’t you? What if you could identify and solve the five
biggest errors people make in their daily diets? That would be
worth a lot of money too, wouldn’t it?
Let’s take a look at something that is just as valuable…the
five critical errors that most salespeople make... and how to
determine if you commit them in your own career. This one takes
a dead bead on the most critical errors with loser like
accuracy.
These results I’ll be sharing with you are a result of over
20 years of active research, 25 years of selling and a
consequence of personally training literally tens of thousands
of salespeople. Are you ready? Here we go.
- Failure to maintain a constant presence in the minds of
prospects or customers.
Quite simply, this is a failure
to prospect consistently both outside and inside of existing
accounts.
- Me too thinking
. Salespeople fail to be creative and
innovative. As a consequence, they don’t differentiate
themselves, their products or their organization from everyone
else in the pack.
- Failure to listen.
This is, perhaps, the most classic
and common error. The salesperson who hears but doesn’t
listen. The salesperson who interrupts prospects, delivers
solutions that are off-target, or simply overwhelms prospects
and customers with verbiage that clearly communicates a
failure to have really listened to anything the other person
has said.
- Failure to anticipate.
A failure to foresee problems
in an account. Missing trends, potential problems, needs or
necessary solutions that could forestall problems or head off
the loss of accounts.
- A tendency to focus on process over results.
The
consequence of this is a poorly executed system of
prioritization that virtually cripples the salesperson from
delivering effective, bottom line results. In short, they are
focused on activities rather than results. As a consequence
they believe they’re busy (and they are). They are just busy
doing all of the wrong things!
Identifying the problems is one thing. Solving them is,
often, quite another. The good news? Awareness is a lot more
than 50 percent of the battle. Are you suffering from some of these
maladies? Let’s take a look at a simple quiz that could yield
some valuable information for you.
- Do you feel that your prospects or customers are driving
hard on price?
- Do your customers ever buy products or services from other
suppliers that you could have provided them?
- Do you find you have to revise or redo proposals for
prospects?
- Have you had prospects reschedule important meetings with
you?
- Do your prospects submit requests for proposals that you
hear about at the last minute?
- Do you ever miss out on additional requests for customers?
- Have you missed your sales forecasts for at least two of
the last four quotas?
- Do you feel that your customers or prospects are looking
for deeper, better solutions than what you have been
providing them?
- Do you feel your prospects or customers get frustrated by
errors?
- Do you find prospects failing to involve you in their
future plans?
Any "yes" answer means you may have a problem! You
then need to go about the business of resolving them to the very
best of your ability.
Recognition and awareness are essential components to start
your success journey.
©2000 Bill Brooks, The Brooks Group, Greensboro, NC
FREE FAX OFFER: Receive Bill Brooks’ 30 minute audio
tape, "Evaluating What To Do". Fax request on your
business letterhead to 336-282-5707.
For almost two decades Bill Brooks has been one of America’s
most in-demand sales speakers. The reason behind Bill’s
tremendous popularity is that he has successfully accomplished
what other sales speakers merely talk about. He enjoys
real-world, legitimate sales success, executive experience,
in-depth topic expertise, academic preparation, as well as the
highest speaking and consulting accreditations. Bill has been a
sales executive and marketing manager, an international sales
award winner, CEO of a 300 million dollar corporation and
successful college football coach with a 70% winning record. He
has managed a national sales force of 4000. Bill is author of
over 100 video and 200 audio programs, and nine books. He has
hosted over 300 satellite television shows. For more information
about Bill Brooks’ speaking, training and consulting services;
or learning tools, call 800-633-7762 or e-mail
