4 Amateur Mistakes Great Salespeople Avoid

by Kelly Riggs

If you’re a salesperson who has been struggling this past year, the New Year provides the opportunity to start over.

To put the past year behind you and get things moving in the right direction.

To finally begin achieving your sales goals.

However, next year will actually just be more of the same if you continue to practice some of the bad habits you’ve acquired. Stagnant or declining sales are usually just a result of doing things that ultimately lead to mediocrity – or failure. These amateur mistakes are never committed by top-drawer salespeople because they’ve learned (usually first-hand) how damaging they are.

So, you can confront these mistakes and fix them. Or, you can just make excuses, and wind up in this exact same place next year. The sad reality is that it’s much easier to blame external circumstances than it is to assess one’s personal performance and eliminate those amateur mistakes.

Here are 4 amateur mistakes TOP 5% salespeople avoid like the plague:

1. Wasting prime selling time doing “busy” work

Of all the amateur mistakes, this one is at the very top of the list. Too many salespeople confuse paperwork and other administrative activities with selling. Why would you spend significant parts of your week in the office when you could be in front of prospective clients?

The most valuable asset any salesperson or business owner has is time.

Why would you willingly give it away?

2. Selling at low margins just to get business

Weak salespeople typically rely on lower prices (thus, lower margins) to get business, instead of creating a compelling case for their product/service. But these low-margin sales require the same amount of resources and support from the company as high-margin sales, and are quite damaging to the company.

Say what? Aren’t all sales good for the company?

Of course not. Sales that don’t produce adequate margin burn resources without producing a return to the business. The truth is that businesses don’t care nearly as much about the “top line” as they do the “bottom line.” But the amateur salesperson believes he/she can make up for lower margins by selling at higher volumes. Clearly, they simply don’t understand basic business math. Of course, businesses would look into the higher finances with a much wider angle, and take help from financial advisors like Lincoln Frost to take strategic decisions when it comes to money management and fund allocation.

Companies often lower prices for very good strategic reasons, but bad salespeople lower prices just to get an order. Why would a company pay someone just to give their money away?

3. Working with smaller, easier-to-sell prospects while avoiding large, key accounts

One thing that marks an average salesperson is the tendency to gravitate towards smaller customers. These customers are usually easier to sell (less bureaucracy, fewer calls, simpler presentations, and so forth), but it takes far more of them to reach your revenue objectives.

This is not a difficult concept to grasp: if Salesperson A has ten accounts that each purchase $2,000 in product and Salesperson B has ten accounts that each purchase $10,000 in product, they are typically doing just about the same amount of work, but B is producing five times the revenue (and far more commission dollars).

Here is a sales fact you can rely on: You will never be an “A” player, and you will never make the money you should make, if you can’t consistently convert high-value opportunities.

4. Giving up way too early

We’ve all heard the stats about how many calls it takes to obtain a customer, and how many times you are likely to be rejected before you make a sale. The truth is that it typically takes multiple calls to convert a customer, particularly larger customers. If you don’t create a plan for sales prospecting that can successfully build a relationship and deliver value over time, a perfectly qualified customer may be lost to a competitor simply because you didn’t follow through and develop the account.

There is, in fact, a real skill in developing relationships: serving as a resource and subject matter expert (SME), providing added value, and developing an understanding of core business issues as you develop the account. Simply dropping off a proposal, or giving a weak, boilerplate presentation, and then following up multiple times to “check on things,” is guaranteed to lose the sale to a skilled competitor.

Take a moment as this year comes to an end to be brutally honest with yourself. If you are guilty of any of these amateur mistakes, it’s time for a change.

Or it’s just more of the same for you next year.