How To Succeed in Sales is a popular topic. Wildly popular. Roundtables, seminars, symposia, conferences, conventions and trade shows always bring in a successful sales guru (and author) to give the audience a positive charge and a bucket of winning strategies. Online courses, instructional videos and lectures, webinars and podcasts – for label converting and every other field – have taken sales training and retraining to a level far higher than ever.

The focus is always positive, as it should be. We aim for fired up, not simmered down. Professional speakers, writers and educators inspire us with examples of proven tactics. But we’re not perfect, and sometimes we err. Perhaps we haven’t had the right training or haven’t received the best guidance from above. Perhaps, and this is true of everyone, we think we’re doing it right but don’t know when we’re doing it only halfway, or poorly, or just wrong.

Maybe it’s time to take a look at the negatives, at the blunders we make when we’re sitting at the conference table with a prospect. Learning from our mistakes is part of our life’s work. We all can find ourselves in a list of sales fails.

You’re not listening. Just about every collection of sales mistakes puts this one first. A Front Row column last year (L&NW, July/August 2018) took a close look at this subject. Hearing, which is involuntary for most people, is the physical act of processing sound waves via the ear and the brain. Listening, which is comprehending what those sounds mean, requires education and effort. The prospect wants to talk. The sales person wants to listen. If they don’t, they walk away with the sound of their own voice.

The corollary is:
You talk too much. There are reasons people talk too much, but this isn’t Psychology Today, so we’ll have to assume that you’re teachable. You may be prepared, but you might not be aware of how windy your presentation is and how you deliver it. Tighten it up. If that’s a struggle, don’t be afraid to ask for help. (Not asking for help is another Psych class, but never mind.)

Chris Orlob, senior director of product marketing at Gong.io (a self-described “conversation intelligence platform for B2B sales teams”), got down to nuts and bolts on this and other sales bungles in a recent article at Sales Hacker (saleshacker.com). Top sales reps talk at most for 46% of a sales call, which means they listen for most of the meeting.

The more mediocre the sales person is, the higher the talk percentage goes. That, says Orlob, will blow a sale. (Gong.io has a data sales team that “analyzed over one million sales call recordings” to compile its findings.)

You’re not prepared. Heaven help you if you don’t have a complete grasp on what it is your company does and makes. If that’s the case, stop reading and do that now. We’re talking here about knowing as much as you can about the company you’re pitching to. In your presentation you inform your listeners what you do and what you can do for them.

Not knowing fully what they do is a large red flag.

Learn in advance who’s in their audience. Find out (these days it’s less difficult to do) about their equipment and processes, the finished products, and which among your competitors might be represented in their business. And know everything, of course, about your competitors.

Wrong words. Orlob’s research identified terms that he calls “sales killers” and recommends excising them from one’s professional vocabulary. These include “billion, roadmap, contract, implement, for example, free trial, and competitor.”  You read that last one right. Find another term.

Sales trainers say to avoid filler words. Orlob says they don’t affect pitch results, but they are annoying. Get rid of “like, so, you know, right, believe me, kind of, actually, I mean, sort of, basically, or something, perfect, at the end of the day, as you can see, cool, and you know what I mean?” I will add “wheelhouse.” That affectation left the hip lexicon some time ago, so drop it.

Asking “checklist” questions. Gong.io recommends not grilling your prospect with rapid-fire questions. They’ll think you’re using a checklist without listening. (Maybe you are.) “Spread your questions throughout the conversation in a balanced, natural way. If you ask them all at the beginning you’ll sound scripted and impersonal. That’s the opposite of the vibe you want to create.”
Allbusiness.com has a list that includes:

Jumping straight to the sale. Do not rush. Take the time to educate your customers, and they will reward you with sales.

Going off topic. Some salespeople overdo the need for a relationship with excessive chatter. Others continue to talk about the product or service but spend an inordinate amount of time on irrelevant information. While you do want to build a relationship and make your customer comfortable, the goal is to make the sale. If the sale is the topic, don’t veer too far off on tangents.

Not closing the sale. This is the flipside of the one above. Once you have provided your customer with the information he or she needs, ask if the customer is ready to make a purchase. It may seem unnecessary, but sometimes asking for the sale can be the nudge your customer needs to make a final decision.

Gong.io highlights Discussing pricing too soon as a practice to be avoided. “Don’t talk about pricing in the first third of the sales call. Our data is clear on this one,” says Orlob. “Top-performing reps talk pricing way into one-hour sales calls … 38 to 46 minutes in, to be precise. Their counterparts who talk about pricing in the first 15 minutes in blow it big time. Their sales numbers aren’t anywhere near as good. Take the hint. Establish value before talking price.”

He warns against Discussing features and technology instead of business and value. “Don’t tell buyers how something works, tell them the results they’re going to get. Spend more time on business value and less on techie and features talk.”

The most successful reps, he adds, spend up to 52% more time talking about business value than their poorer-performing peers. They spend up to 39% less time talking about features and technical topics than those same peers.

Asking too many questions. This claim might make some people uncomfortable: How can we know where to draw the line? Orlob trots out some numbers.

“Think about the discovery part of the call. How do you unpack a buyer’s pain points and business issues? Do you ask enough questions or too many? What’s the right number?

“As a general rule, the more questions you ask, the better. Average reps ask 6.3 questions and top performers ask 10 to 14, and they also dig deeper and listen more. But be careful. There’s a diminishing rate of return. After 14 questions, your sales rate heads back down toward average,” he says.

There are more, but this one stands out: Giving more than a two-minute company overview. Talking long about your company is not that important to your potential client and could decrease your chances to move ahead.

Speak for two minutes or under – it’s plenty long, so practice – and do so generally, before you get to the specifics about what you’re offering.  You’ll do fine.


The author is president of Jack Kenny Media, a communications firm specializing in the packaging industry, and is the former editor of L&NW magazine. He can be reached at jackjkenny@gmail.com.