The 16 Habits That Can Hold You Back in Sales
Are you wondering why your sales are down? Review the following habits to see if you’re guilty of one (or several!) that could be affecting your sales.
- Failure to be present: Repeated and annoying displays of behavior that indicate we would rather be somewhere else, somewhen else, or with someone else.
- Vocal filler: The overuse of unnecessary (and meaningless) verbal qualifiers.
- Selling past the close: The irresistible urge to verbalize and execute every possible step of the sales process.
- Selective hearing: The absence of active listening in the presence of a customer.
- Contact without purpose: Repeated deliberate communications for no valid business reason (other than wanting to sell something).
- Curb qualifying: The tendency to judge a prospect’s means and motive superficially from a distance.
- Using tension as a tool: Also known as “sale ends Saturday.”
- One-upping: The constant need to top our conversational partner in an effort to show the world just how smart we are.
- Overfamiliarity: The use of inappropriately intimate gestures.
- Withholding passion and energy: The tendency to forget that people decide on the basis of emotion and later justify that decision with logic.
- Explaining failure: Behaving under the erroneous belief that simply being able to assign blame, fault, or guilt is enough to satisfy the customer.
- Never having to say you’re sorry: The personal inability to apologize or accept responsibility for personal or organization error or injury.
- Throwing others under the bus: Sacrificing a colleague—often anonymous, often vulnerable, and usually innocent—by blaming him or her for one’s own functional failure.
- Propagandizing: Overreliance on organizational rhetoric and themes.
- Wasting energy: Taking part in organizational blame-storming and pity parties.
- Obsessing over the numbers: Achieving revenue, profit, or productivity targets at the expense of metrics of a higher calling.