4 MISTAKES THAT PREVENT YOU FROM CLOSING THE DEAL
You can make numerous mistakes, where you risk losing potential sales and deals.
Emphasising the need for trust-building, understanding customer needs, and the importance of fulfilling commitments to maintain credibility to achieve tremendous success. Ultimately, prioritising trust drives successful sales outcomes.
Here are four common mistakes that many typically make, which you should be aware of.
1. You want to sell without having relation and trust first
Consider this: You may handle appointment scheduling or have someone do it for you. Now you finally have a meeting with a decision-maker who is evaluating potential partners.
It’s about presenting a great offer right away, isn’t it?
No. Now it’s about maintaining control. It requires discipline from you to stay in the competition. In such cases, it’s about playing your cards right – even if you haven’t been dealt any cards! You don’t know the customer, and the customer doesn’t know you.
In a meeting with the customer, trust and mutual understanding must first be built. Therefore, you must quickly understand the customer’s situation, market, and position, strengths, and weaknesses.
Such ability shows that you understand and are interested in the customer. It’s also in this phase that it’s important for you to quickly understand what kind of profile the customer has so you can adapt as best as possible. All this creates security; the customer likes you, and you start to collect cards.
Therefore: Without having established a relation and created understanding and trust, you will often create distance from the deal, even if you have the best solution.
2. You’re trying to rush the sales process
Consider this: Your customer is in the buying process. And you want to get the most out of the first meeting. It’s tempting to try to shorten the sales process a bit and skip a few steps. Maybe you even need to close the sale quickly yourself. Why work on building the sale if you can skip straight to the presentation? Why spend time connecting value to price when you can send proposals and fees simultaneously?
Rushing through the sales process without aligning where the customer is in their process contributes to creating distance from the deal. It takes time to get the customer on board all the way. It’s not enough to grab the customer’s attention and interest; you must uncover their needs and, most importantly, their motive for making a decision.
Therefore, Take it easy and work systematically! Create value in each sales process step so that each phase works for you and not against you. Then, the customer will experience that you take care of their interests and needs.
3. You’re trying to push your product
Consider this: Your customers have seen and heard a lot before about features, benefits, and outcomes. Do you think your product is new to them? You can be sure it’s not. Pushing a product onto the customer is more than enough to create distance.
What happened to building relationships? Where did the needs assessment go? And what happened to the value and vision the customer should have seen in your offered solution? Pushing products creates no value. It only lowers the value and creates resistance to giving you the deal.
Therefore, Work on creating a higher level of value for the customer throughout the sales process.
4. You don’t keep your promises
Consider this: When you keep your promises, you build trust. Nothing undermines a potential deal more than failing to deliver on a contract. Whether it’s a commitment to make a phone call or send an email, failing to follow through creates doubt about your reliability. Salespeople who consistently fail to honour their obligations also cast doubt on their company’s values and customer service.
Therefore, Make it a priority to avoid these missteps. Take your time. Stay faithful to your sales process and honour your commitments. Doing so will lead to closing more deals – and achieving more tremendous success.
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